https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/12/amazon-may-be-developing-ai-chips-for-alexa/

The Information has a report this morning that Amazon is working on building AI chips for the Echo, which would allow Alexa to more quickly parse information and get those answers.

Getting those answers much more quickly to the user, even by a few seconds, might seem like a move that’s not wildly important. But for Amazon, a company that relies on capturing a user’s interest in the absolute critical moment to execute on a sale, it seems important enough to drop that response time as close to zero as possible to cultivate the behavior that Amazon can give you the answer you need immediately — especially, in the future, if it’s a product that you’re likely to buy. Amazon, along with Google and Apple, are at the point where users expect technology that works and works quickly, and are probably not as forgiving as they are to other companies relying on problems like image recognition (like, say, Pinterest).