It's the week of Monday the 15th of January and we have got lots of AI news to catch up on this week, what's happening at Google, what's happening with Alexa and a little company might have heard of called Walmart. Let's get into it, this is this week's AI forecast. This week on the forecast we are starting off with some news coming out of Google and unfortunately, it's not great. Google have just announced that they have cut hundreds of jobs in the engineering and other divisions, according to reporting by T.A. from New York Times and many other sources. They've been quite big cuts happening in the Google Assistant product area and that goes across both software and also the hardware that goes with it, including the Nest Hub division and also what's been happening with Pixel phone. Now of course, not great news if you have been working at Google. This of course follows lots of trends we've already seen in past weeks and really months to be honest of the tech layoffs happening across Silicon Valley and around the world. The world of AI is not only changing the way in which we get work done but how many people we seem to require to do that work and whilst that is a challenge for us in the crores of industries, it seems that tech is not immune to this problem either. Google saying here that they have layered off hundreds of workers in several divisions on Wednesday night last week, the middle of CES, I think they were probably hoping this news was going to go under the radar but hasn't seem to happen. In particular, it seems sort of affected the Google Assistant area. Now, typically I don't think this is entirely surprising. We've seen that the system features have been dealt over the past couple of years, including the shutdown of the Google Action Framework which allows you to build Alexa skill style applications that ran on Google Assistant. That has gone and we've also seen a much more focus on the world of Android and of course with everything that's happening in the world of LLM's, Gemini and other updates, not with standing, Google Assistant isn't really a standalone product in the way in which it's been thought of historically so maybe this is not entirely surprising but still, not good news and obviously we wish well to all of the Googlers that have been affected by this, of course let us know if you want to share your story. Next up it has been a massive week once again over in Las Vegas for the consumer electronic show CES 2024. It was AI everywhere this past week. If you want to check out my previous video about the Rabbit R1 which kind of stole the show you can find that over at the link in the comments. But one of the big players this week and this year is going to be Amazon of course they are making massive strides. Now, Amazon is not new to the world of AI, certainly not new to the world of CES and their booth had a lot to show this year about where their future erection is going so let's take a look at what they announced. As reported here by VoiceBot.ai to Bret and the team, this Alexa showcase this year showed off the new generative AI capabilities that they have previously been trailing at the Alexa live events that came out in 2023. Now, we've known for some time that a lot of developers have been invited into developer previews to give this a try and they showcase three experiences from Character AI, Molly and Splash. The first up is the Character AI demo which is probably the most impressive of all of them. Character AI of course is not an Alexa only product but is an application platform that allows you to build essentially what they call synthetic people both historical and fictional characters being able to be created as you can see in this demo. Character AI allowed us to create these fictitious synthetic characters. They've got examples like Socrates for example or Tesla, Nikola Tesla, not MMD with me. And now on the Alexa skill you're able to interact with over 25 of these unique voices and have conversations with them in a much more fluid way. This is using the Alexa L11 technology that allows you to bring your own data, your own APIs, your own characters and content to the Alexa platform and interact with them in a real time way that previously was quite difficult to do as we know if you've used Alexa before it's much more of a one in one out type dialogue. But now with this new operation you're able to have much more of a generative AI type experience, more like chatting to a GPT. And now with Character AI you can tap into many of these new types of services, both noting these again only available in the US. The second demo was from our friends at Bolly who showed off their new experiences. 20 questions in this generative mode rather than it being reliant upon that kind of input output, making sure you always get it right with what you're asking and answering which has been difficult for a gameplay up until now on the Alexa device. You're able to have this more immersive experience and use in 20 questions you can see in the demo here, actual kind of milestone of big. I've to talk to something in a realistic way you're able to ask it much more open-ended questions and answers and have a more natural kind of gameplay experience. The third came out of a cover called Splash which was funded through the Alexa Fund which is part of the broader Alexa program. And here you can see the demo of the Splash Music skill which basically allows you to decide on a kind of musical category that you want to create and then go ahead and create a song using lyrics and singing along and making a whole composition within the experience. So something quite cool, I think quite niche play of a monist but certainly demonstrates the technology really well and again it comes back to the overarching point here of what Amazon is trying to communicate which is that you can have a more interactive experience with Alexa than ever before because you're able to have this generative AI experience. So that was Alexa at CES. And finally we've got some AI news and comes from one of the big brand players in the space, Walmart in the US, led by Dominique Essig who's a different of ours. She has launched an amazing program on team over there within Conversation AI and this week they demonstrated their new generative AI capabilities at CES. Let's take a look. Walmart demonstrated their new generative AI search and AI replenishment features at the show in Vegas this past week. What does that mean? What this now means is that using generative search or search powered by essentially a large language model, you're able to have a more open dialogue with the cart in the Walmart app. So being able to go and ask for a series of different items or be able to ask more question-based requirements here. You can see in this demo that the person is using the app says, give me a help with planning a football watch party and generative AI comes up with a bunch of different suggestions from the Walmart product catalog and starts allowing you to build your basket which I think is a really interesting way of approaching shopping and search. We often do the regular week of grocery shop but we also plan for all sorts of different occasions. So I think this could be really helpful. I'm sure we'll see many more grocery retailers go in this direction. The other part of the demo that they showed off, the other part of the demo that they showed off is using AI to be predictive modeling to do run of the products that you most regularly order which is similar to the data replenishment that Amazon has previously done and using AI though now able to make this a little bit more smart. The other thing that Walmart showed off was their virtual try-on service using these virtual avatars and being able to get some feedback as well. I think lots of interesting things coming out of this sector. Retail is one of these most ripe for disruption but it's also the most complicated to deal with because you've got large product catalogs, lots of things that have similar names and brands to differentiate between so it can be quite a struggle to get going in this space but I think Walmart are doing a great job demonstrating what they are up to here. That's it for this week's forecast. I hope you found that helpful. Some stories for you to get digging to your fine links to them in the comments below. If you've been watching this for a couple of weeks now and you've got thoughts or feedback then do let me know I've loved to hear from you. And of course if you're watching over on YouTube I would love it if you would hit the little like button or click subscribe so you get these videos in your inbox on a weekly basis. That's all for now. I'll see you next week for another forecast and some other videos in between. Take care.