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Amazon partners with NVIDIA on in-vehicle AI assistant technology

March 16, 2026 4:47 PM

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to develop technology that would allow car manufacturers to integrate Amazon's Alexa Custom Assistant with NVIDIA's DRIVE AGX automotive computing platform.

The proposed solution combines edge processing within vehicles for faster responses with cloud-based capabilities for tasks including music streaming, booking services, and smart home device control. The technology would enable automakers to create their own branded voice assistant using Amazon's platform.

"Automakers are telling us they want their vehicles to act as a smart assistant and understand passengers the way passengers understand each other, through conversation, context, and awareness of the world around them," said Anes Hodžić, vice president of Amazon Smart Vehicles.

NVIDIA's Rishi Dhall, vice president of Automotive, described the vehicle cabin as "the most demanding AI inference environment in consumer technology" requiring real-time speech processing, vision language models, and multimodal reasoning under privacy requirements.

The Alexa Custom Assistant service allows automakers to build branded voice assistants that connect to cloud-based features such as music streaming, smart home controls, shopping, and service booking. The collaboration aims to provide multimodal intelligence that integrates with existing in-vehicle infotainment systems.

Amazon stated the technology is planned to be available for automaker evaluation in early 2027. The company indicated automakers can request private demonstrations by contacting the Amazon Alexa Custom Assistant team.

The announcement comes as Amazon has introduced new personality styles for its Alexa+ service, offering conversation styles ranging from concise responses to more conversational interactions. Amazon also announced partnerships with Expedia, Yelp, Angi, and Square to develop new experiences for Alexa+.

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