After 12 years, Amazon returns to the smartphone market with AI.

According to sources, four insiders revealed that Amazon's Devices and Services department is developing a new project called "Transformer", planning to launch a brand-new smartphone again after more than a decade, but the project is still in its early stages.

This phone is regarded as a potential mobile personalized device, featuring AI integration and mobile personalization, and can be synchronized with the home voice assistant Alexa to provide services to Amazon users all day long. A major focus of the project is to deeply integrate AI capabilities into the device, thereby eliminating the dependence on traditional app stores - users can use services without downloading and registering apps. Although Alexa will be a core feature throughout, insiders say it may not necessarily be the only major operating system of the device.

The project is part of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' long-term vision: to bring the "ubiquitous voice assistant" from the science fiction movie "Star Trek" to reality. Bezos also envisioned a shopping-centric phone that could offer Prime member discounts and delivery benefits, obtain users' usage behavior, shopping records, content preferences and other behavioral data, to challenge Apple's ecosystem.

According to the vision, the personalization features of this phone will bring users unprecedented convenience when shopping on Amazon, watching Prime Video, listening to Prime Music, and ordering meals through partners like Grubhub.

The project is led by the ZeroOne innovation team, which was established by Amazon's Devices department only a year ago. Its core mission is to create breakthrough electronic devices. The R & D team is currently evaluating two product routes in parallel: one is a traditional smartphone, and the other is a minimalist feature phone inspired by the Light Phone. The latter aims to reduce users' screen addiction problems and is expected to enter the market as a second backup device for Apple or Samsung users.

At present, the details of the "Transformer" project are not clear. The price, expected sales volume and investment scale of the phone, as well as the release time are also uncertain. Insiders warn that if the strategy changes or financial pressure increases, the project may also be cancelled.

Amazon entered the mobile phone market in 2014 and launched its first phone "Fire Phone" supervised by Bezos. However, due to the lack of mainstream applications and serious power consumption of 3D functions, the product was discontinued 14 months later, resulting in a write-down of $170 million in unsold inventory, becoming one of the company's most famous failed projects.

It is worth mentioning that at the end of last year, Douyin's AI large model "Doubao" announced the launch of Doubao Mobile Assistant, and cooperated with ZTE to launch "Doubao Mobile" - Nubia M153, priced at 3,499 yuan, which caused a rush to buy once it hit the market. As a mobile assistant with system-level permissions, it can operate smartphones like humans and tries to reshape the logic of human-computer interaction.

According to the official introduction of Douyin, Doubao Mobile Assistant is an AI assistant software cooperated with mobile phone manufacturers at the operating system level on the basis of Doubao APP. The AI assistant has three core highlights: end-side memory, cross APP operation and multi-modal interaction. Doubao Mobile Assistant can automatically jump between multiple applications according to user commands, complete tasks such as ticket checking and ordering, commodity ordering, batch downloading of files, one-key query of logistics progress of multiple software, and can also automatically compare prices and place orders across platforms.

Source: E-commerce Party