Amazon.com Inc. is digging further into the artificial intelligence assistant game today with a major update to Amazon Quick.

Whereas other chatbots offer tons of promise but often result in more work for the user, the revamped Amazon Quick is billed as a deeply personalized and proactive assistant that lives within user’s desktops to get work done on their behalf.

The company said Amazon Quick is designed to be fundamentally different from other intelligent AI companions because of its ability to move beyond the confines of its chat interface. Instead, it’s a native application that anyone can download onto their desktop, even without an Amazon Web Services account.

Amazon said the primary challenge it’s addressing with the revamped Quick is the friction that comes with using AI tools. Though generative AI assistants promise to save users time, many lead to endless copy-pasting and switching between windows and tabs, with users required to come up with creative prompts to get the results they’re looking for. As Amazon explains it, “most AI products have overpromised but created more work.”

Amazon Quick solves this because it lives exactly where people get their work done, and integrates with tools such as Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Zoom and Salesforce. Whereas other tools sit idle, waiting for users to ask a question, Quick will monitor their work in order to take proactive action, surfacing information before it’s requested. For instance, Amazon said, it can remind someone that they still need to reply to a priority email, or alert them to a deal that still needs to be updated in Salesforce, or tell them which documents still require their attention.

The app doesn’t just limit itself to nudges and answers, either. It can also provide help, such as drafting an email, editing documents and implementing feedback based on comments and replies in Slack. Furthermore, it can help users in managing tasks, such as sending a Slack back to someone’s manager, updating a new document with fresh content or responding to a ticket in Jira.

Amazon Quick is powered by a personal knowledge graph that’s based on each user’s desktop interactions. It connects their local files, their calendar, email inbox and important applications, and then it sits there and learns. The idea is that, over time, it will become smarter. Users can ask Amazon Quick, “What am I missing today?” or “What should I prioritize?” and it will respond based on the context of their work.

In the long term, it seems that Amazon aspires for Quick to become more than just a simple utility tool. Ultimately, it sees Quick as becoming the connective tissue for enterprises, hoping to eliminate the burden of searching for information and setting reminders completely.

Image: Amazon