Amazon’s recent AI-powered Alexa

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Alexa’s long-awaited AI revamp is here — and it could be Amazon’s biggest AI move yet.

With an enormous intelligence upgrade and recent agentic power set to land within the hands of over 100M Prime members, is that this the ‘ChatGPT moment’ for voice assistants?

In today’s AI rundown:

• Amazon’s gen AI-powered Alexa+

• ElevenLabs’s recent speech-to-text AI

• Personalize your AI coding assistants

• Inception Labs’ ultra-fast diffusion model

• 4 recent AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AMAZON

🔊 Amazon’s gen AI-powered Alexa+

The Rundown: Amazon just unveiled Alexa+, its highly-anticipated next-generation digital assistant completely rebuilt with AI — promising more conversational interactions, personalization, and agentic capabilities for on a regular basis tasks.

The small print:

• Alexa+ can connect and leverage multiple LLMs, including Amazon’s Nova and Anthropic’s Claude, selecting one of the best model for every task at hand.

• The revamped assistant can perform complex agentic tasks like booking reservations, ordering groceries, purchasing concert tickets, and more.

• Other features include document evaluation, remembering user preferences, maintaining conversation context, and integration with lots of of services.

• It should cost $19.99 monthly but comes free with Amazon Prime membership, with early access rolling out within the U.S. next month.

Why it matters: Legacy voice assistants like Alexa and Siri have lagged massively behind the AI boom, but this release will finally put advanced voice agents within the homes of 100M+ Prime members — potentially triggering one other ‘ChatGPT moment’ for consumers outside the tech bubble (assuming it goes higher than Apple Intelligence).

TOGETHER WITH WORKOS

🔐 Protect your AI apps from bad actors

The Rundown: WorkOS Radar is a security solution that shields your AI platform from fake signups, throwaway emails, and brute force attempts — all powered by advanced device fingerprinting and real-time detection.

With WorkOS Radar, you possibly can:

• Rapidly detect and challenge unfamiliar and suspicious devices in real time

• Stop free-tier abuse and fraudulent behavior with advanced detection

• Customize threat responses to suit your app’s exact security needs

Start integrating Radar today.

ELEVENLABS

🗣️ ElevenLabs’s recent speech-to-text AI

The Rundown: ElevenLabs released Scribe, a brand new speech-to-text model that claims to be probably the most accurate on the planet, outperforming industry leaders like Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash and OpenAI’s Whisper v3 across dozens of languages.

The small print:

• Scribe supports 99 languages, with claimed accuracy rates exceeding 95% for over 25 languages, including English, Italian, and Spanish.

• The model raises the bar in quite a lot of languages that traditionally lack speech recognition and transcription options, like Serbian, Cantonese, and Malayalam.

• Its other features include multi-speaker labeling, word-level timestamps, and the flexibility to detect non-verbal audio markers like laughter or music.

• Scribe is priced at $0.40 per hour of transcribed audio for pre-recorded audio, with a low-latency version for real-time applications coming soon.

Why it matters: With Scribe’s accuracy and deal with the unpredictability of real-world audio, people can expect flawless subtitles, searchable podcast archives, and more. It also opens up high-level transcriptions to a more global audience — particularly for low-resource languages which have previously been neglected by other models.

AI TRAINING

🤖 Personalize your AI coding assistants

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn the right way to add custom instructions to Cursor and Windsurf AI coding tools to personalize and enhance your AI coding development workflow.

Here’s your step-by-step guide:

1. Download Cursor or Windsurf in your device from their official web sites.

2. To establish Windsurf rules, create a .windsurfrules file in your project root or make a choice from global rules or project rules via “Edit Rules” in Settings.

3. Similarly, to configure rules in Cursor, head over to its Settings and arrange global AI rules or project-specific rules.

Pro tip: Global rules set universal preferences, while project rules define instructions for specific project requirements. You can even browse this GitHub repo for ready-to-use templates of Cursor rules.

PRESENTED BY INNOVATING WITH AI

💼 Start your profession as an AI Consultant

The Rundown: Innovating with AI’s recent program, AI Consultancy Project, equips AI enthusiasts with all of the resources they should capitalize on the booming AI consulting market — set to grow 8x to $54.7B by 2032.

This system offers:

• Tools and framework to seek out clients and deliver top-notch services

• A 6-month roadmap to construct a 6-figure AI consulting business

• Student landing their first AI client in as little as 3 days

Request early access to The AI Consultancy Project.

INCEPTION LABS

⚡ Inception Labs’ ultra-fast diffusion model

The Rundown: Inception Labs just emerged from stealth with Mercury, a brand new ‘diffusion’ LLM that generates text as much as 10x faster than traditional LLMs while still matching their quality — with speeds over 1000 tokens/sec on standard H100 chips.

The small print:

• LLMs generate text one token at a time, but Mercury’s diffusion approach generates entire blocks in parallel for increased speed, efficiency, and control.

• Their first model, Mercury Coder, matches or beats the coding performance of models like GPT-4o Mini and Claude 3.5 Haiku at 5-10x the speed.

• Inception was founded by Stanford professor Stefano Ermon, who researched the right way to apply diffusion (commonly used for image and video generation) to text.

• Mercury models can function drop-in replacements for traditional models in areas like code generation, customer support, and enterprise automation.

Why it matters: By bringing “Sora-like” diffusion to text, Inception goes against the grain on fundamental assumptions about how AI should generate language. Its technique could potentially enable more powerful agents, higher and more efficient reasoning, and AI experiences that feel truly instantaneous.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🎥 Wan 2.1 – Alibaba’s recent open-source SOTA AI video suite

• 🧠 Advanced Voice – ChatGPT’s conversational voice feature without cost users

• ⚙️ Gemini Code Assist – Free AI coder with 180K code completions per 30 days

• 📹 Project Starlight by Topaz Labs – Bring old videos back to life with AI

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 💼 UiPath – Enterprise Sales Executive, Public Sector

• 📈 Cresta – Analytics Engineer

• 🌍 Luma AI – Community Marketer

• 🔒 Curai – Privacy Lead

📰 Every part else in AI today

Hume AI released Octave, a text-to-speech LLM that understands emotional context, allowing creators to design custom voices with control over emotion and delivery.

Perplexity introduced a redesigned voice mode in its latest iOS update, featuring six different voice options, direct search result navigation, and more.

Poe launched Poe Apps, enabling users to create apps and visual UI interfaces using a mix of reasoning, multimodal, image, video, and audio models on the platform.

Vevo Therapeutics launched the Arc Virtual Cell Atlas featuring Tahoe-100M, an open-source dataset mapping 60,000 drug-cell interactions across 100M cells.

Exa launched Websets, a search product that deploys agents for higher results, beating Google by over 20x and OpenAI Deep Research by 10x on complex queries.

IBM unveiled its recent Granite 3.2 model family, featuring compact reasoning, vision-language, and specialized time series models for enterprise use.

Microsoft launched Phi-4 multimodal and Phi-4 mini SLMs, matching or exceeding the performance of models twice their size on certain tasks.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our next workshop today, Thursday, February twenty seventh, at 1 PM EST and learn the right way to transform your creative concepts into skilled videos with LTX Studio’s Tom Factor, Director of Creative Strategy and AI, and Alon Yaar, VP of Product.

RSVP here. Not a member yet? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

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See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team