All Alexa moving to the cloud & Rivian's AI assistant ambitions

[Jaques R1S]

Looks like Amazon is disallowing local-only Alexa. I have disabled Alexa in my car for a few days now, so I am not sure if Rivian does any car-side processing, but I figured this is interesting for Rivian because it sets the path that AI Assistant will require some form of connectivity for functionality (and also data sharing). It also raises interesting cases of people in the car who may also get caught up in recordings.

Perhaps it's a short-lived gap, because it also looks like Rivian is aiming to use other LLMs or to roll their own AI assistant.

Why does it matter?

• Depends if you're privacy conscious or paranoid

• When I am outdoors I basically never have connectivity

• From Rivian's PoV, this may be a nudge more towards the DIY, which could be interesting

I can't find much details on Orin without actually buying one, but I am pretty curious what TTS options it has for better local-vehicle (and faster) processing

Another thing is, I think Rivian is going to move away from Alexa in favour of its own AI. I could be wrong but my understanding is that Rivian uses AWS to train its AI for various use cases and teach it new things based of real world experience and feedback from customers then those new “rules” for autonomous driving behaviour and commands recognition for human interactions with the vehicle will be pushed out to vehicles to update the onboard system which won't need connectivity to function.