🎙️Alexa Gets an AI Overhaul, But Is it Ready?
Plus: Alexa Gets an AI Overhaul, But Is it Ready?
The voice wars are heating up as tech giants race to build next-generation, voice-first AI interfaces. Apple is betting big on Siri as the primary way you’ll interact with your iPhone and AI apps. Meta is snapping up voice app startups, and Alexa is getting a major AI overhaul.
Would you feel comfortable chatting with your phone for everything? How about with AI-powered glasses? This future is talking to us, let’s dive in and stay curious.
Apple’s Focus on Voice-First Future
AI Industry Warns of Historic Copyright Threat
AI Tools - Law
Alexa Gets an AI Overhaul, But Is it Ready?
📰 AI News and Trends
Nvidia and AMD will give the U.S. government a 15% cut of the sales of their chips in China, in exchange for export licenses
OpenAI is restoring GPT-4o to ChatGPT, after users were furious with GPT-5.
The next Grok update is expected to be natively multimodal with direct audio and video processing.
X Makes Big Push on Text-To-Video Functionality by offering free access
🌐 Other Tech news
CATL, the world’s largest battery company, is to halt production at a mine in China, which is responsible for around 3% of the world’s lithium production. This move comes as Beijing vies to crack down on overcapacity in several industries amid deflation fears. Prices may rise as a result of the closing.
Age Verification Is Sweeping Gaming. Is It Ready for the Age of AI Fakes?
How high will Ether price go after breaking $4K?
Harvard Reveals $116 Million Investment in BlackRock Bitcoin ETF
China opened its first full-scale shopping center dedicated entirely to robots on Friday, as part of a broader push to bring robotics from research labs into people’s homes.
Apple’s Focus on Voice-First Future
Apple is preparing a major Siri upgrade in 2025 with a new App Intents system, allowing full hands-free control of apps, from editing and sending photos to adding items to a shopping cart, all by voice. This capability could power Apple’s next wave of hardware, including a smart display (delayed a year) and a tabletop robot.
The rollout, planned for spring alongside a Siri infrastructure overhaul, faces hurdles: engineers are testing with select apps (Uber, Amazon, YouTube, WhatsApp, etc.) but may limit high-risk use cases like banking. Precision and accuracy are top priorities after past Siri missteps. Just like we discussed on our previous issue, audio processing has become a major game-changer for AI companies. Meta has acquired two audio startups to process and understand emotion through voice, but they lack the hardware. Apple has all the hardware to become the winner in the AI voice future, but it lacks the processing power.
Other Apple updates:
iOS 26 & Liquid Glass 1.0: Nearing release with performance boosts, UI tweaks, and new animations.
Supply Chain Optics: Tim Cook pledged to make all iPhone and Apple Watch glass in the US, a symbolic $2.5B shift amid Trump’s new tariffs — sweetened with a gold bar gift.
Talent Drain: A fifth AI engineer has left Apple for Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, signaling ongoing morale issues.
If Apple nails voice-driven control, it could finally deliver on Siri’s 15-year-old promise, and quietly change how people use their iPhones.
AI Industry Warns of Historic Copyright Threat
Anthropic is appealing a record copyright class action that could involve 7M claimants and hundreds of billions in damages over AI training data.
Trade groups and digital rights advocates warn the ruling could force Anthropic to settle, setting a precedent that may cripple the AI sector and deter investment. They argue that class actions are ill-suited for copyright disputes and could leave unresolved the central question: Can copyrighted works be legally used to train generative AI?
🧰 AI Tools
Law
Harvey AI – Built on GPT-4, specializes in legal research, drafting contracts, summarizing case law, and answering complex legal questions in plain English. Used by major law firms like Allen & Overy.
Casetext CoCounsel – AI legal assistant (acquired by Thomson Reuters) that handles document review, deposition prep, and legal research with source citations.
Spellbook – Drafts and reviews contracts directly in Microsoft Word, using AI trained on legal language to flag risky clauses and suggest improvements.
BriefCatch AI – Legal writing enhancer that helps lawyers edit motions, briefs, and memos for clarity, compliance, and persuasive impact.
Lex Machina – Litigation analytics tool that uses AI to predict case outcomes, assess opposing counsel strategies, and analyze judge tendencies based on historical data.
Download our list of 1000+ Tools for free.
Alexa Gets an AI Overhaul, But Is it Ready?
Amazon has launched Alexa+, a generative AI–powered upgrade designed to make its voice assistant more conversational and capable, handling multistep tasks, follow-up questions, and creative requests without constant wake words. The system combines 70+ AI models, including Amazon’s own and Anthropic’s Claude, to route commands to the best tool for the job.
Early tests show improvements, like booking restaurants, creating stories, and managing complex timers, but also serious flaws. Alexa+ lags behind ChatGPT’s voice mode, struggles with basic tasks (canceling alarms, document summaries), and sometimes delivers factual errors or “hallucinations.” Missing features, like presence-based routines, add to the gaps.
Amazon admits it’s still “sanding edges” as it rebuilds Alexa’s rule-based legacy system into a probabilistic AI platform, a process that’s slower, wordier, and technically complex. For now, even loyal Alexa users may prefer the older, more reliable version until the bugs are fixed.