Oh, you know what I'm realizing is happening? I'm getting thrown off because every time I'm saying, Alexa, my echo buds are pinging me.

Ah, in this conversation, I've disabled the hands-free access through Alexa. See, you're obviously a pro at this.

You've been through this. So I'm going into the Alexa app in my Android phone. Yes. And you go to Echo and devices. And I see it enable Alexa hands free and it's toggled on right now.

I need to toggle that off. Okay. Thank you. I love this. Real time tech support from the SVP.

Welcome to Geekwire.

I'm Geekwire co-founder Todd Bishop.

This week, we take a closer look at Amazon's Alexa

in a world where generative AI is enabling increasingly sophisticated conversations

with digital assistance.

How does Alexa stack up against ChatGPT?

Is that even a fair comparison?

How will privacy play into all of this?

And what's Amazon's commitment to Alexa

in this era of corporate cutbacks?

Those are some of the topics we discuss with Rohit Prasad,

the longtime senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa,

whose role has expanded in the past year to lead the Alexa business. We started with his own

history in the field and the evolution of voice and AI technologies. When you look at your journey

to Amazon and your 10 years with Amazon, can you just give me a thumbnail

sketch of your life and how you got to this point? Absolutely. So I was born in India. I grew up big

in the Star Trek era and sports. But what fascinated me was this talking computer from very early days where you could just

speak to your environment and it speaks back to you. And in the early days of my career,

...