Amazon takes on ChatGPT: Tech giant launches a rival AI chatbot called Q
It took Amazon a while, but the tech giant has finally jumped on the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot bandwagon.
The company just unveiled its version of ChatGPT, called ‘Q’, which could be a reference to the ingenious techie in the James Bond films.
Q – designed for employees in areas such as IT, software, customer service and more – lets employees ask questions specific to their business.
Skills include summarizing meetings, explaining programming code, and locating information from hundreds of business documents.
Q comes shortly after Elon Musk announced his own ‘sarcastic’ AI bot called Grok, which will be integrated into X (formerly known as Twitter).
Tech giant Amazon is finally joining the AI chatbot party with its own offering, called ‘Q’, aimed at businesses
In a blog postAmazon said the new assistant is work-specific and can be tailored to a customer’s business, much like ChatGPT Enterprise, its version of ChatGPT for employees.
Currently, Q is only available to users of Connect (Amazon’s contact center service) in parts of the US, but it will be rolled out to other services and countries soon.
Some of the companies already using Q include car giant BMW, IT company Accenture and pharmaceutical company Gilead, as well as Amazon itself.
“Q can help you get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, solve problems, generate content, and take action using the data and expertise found in your company’s information repositories, code, and business systems,” says Company.
“When you chat with Amazon Q, you’ll immediately get relevant information and advice to streamline tasks, speed decision-making, and fuel creativity and innovation at work.”
Q can be connected to a company’s data, information and systems so it can obtain numerous answers relevant to the business – but these are secure and not publicly available.
The name Q may be a reference to the ingenious tech expert from the James Bond film series, played here by Desmond Llewelyn
‘Your AI-powered expert’: Skills include summarizing meetings, explaining programming code and locating information from hundreds of business documents
Employees can ask questions about things they previously had to search for in various sources, such as Google Drive, Microsoft 365, and Dropbox, avoiding the tedious task of searching through multiple documents.
In this way, Q will save time and increase a company’s productivity, although it can also perform the types of tasks for which the general public already turns to ChatGPT.
Q can help with tasks such as generating a blog post, summarizing documents, composing emails, and creating meeting agendas.
Amazon said Q was “built with security and privacy in mind” and never uses content from its enterprise customers “to train the underlying models.”
In other words, no sensitive corporate data is used to train Q and the tool only accesses corporate information through a secure Amazon service account.
It follows the controversy surrounding ChatGPT’s creator OpenAI, which is being taken to court over claims it broke copyright rules by ‘taking’ books without permission.
Amazon is the latest tech company to jump on the chatbot bandwagon after the huge success of ChatGPT, which was released a year ago.
Amazon’s Q comes just over a year after the release of ChatGPT – and soon after revolutionized the way we get information online. Unlike Amazon, Google was so freaked out by ChatGPT that it rushed out its own chatbot, Bard, in March
Q comes shortly after Elon Musk announced that his own ‘sarcastic’ AI bot called Grok (pictured) will be integrated into X (formerly known as Twitter)
Elon Musk (pictured here on November 2 in Britain) said Grok is currently only available to ‘a select group’ before a wider rollout
Earlier this month, Elon Musk unveiled Grok for
Grok will be built within X, but only for users subscribed to
Meanwhile, Google rushed out its offering, Bard, in March, following concerns that ChatGPT could replace Google Search as the best way to get information online.
Other chatbots include My AI built into social media app Snapchat, YouChat from US search engine You.com and Ernie Bot from Chinese company Baidu.