amazon – Tech News

Amazon’s new ‘getitfast’ delivery page lists items you can have in 1 hour

Amazon announced on Tuesday that it’s making it easier for users to find products eligible for its 1-hour and 3- hour delivery options with a new “getitfast” page for same-day delivery products available in their area. Amazon is also introducing new search filters for 1-hour and 3-hour delivery, along with tags on eligible products — which could be convenient, but could also do even more to squeeze out local businesses if this becomes a popular option.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/895940/amazon-1-hour-3-hour-delivery

Brief, Chill, or Sweet? Amazon’s Alexa+ Now Lets You Pick Your AI’s Personality

Amazon is adding three new personalities to its AI-powered voice assistant, Alexa+. Users can tune their voice assistant to be Brief, Chill, or Sweet. If set to Brief, Alexa Plus will provide shorter, more direct responses, with just the details you need. Switching to Chill will make the voice assistant respond in a laid-back, friendly tone, while choosing Sweet will transform it into a constant cheerleader with upbeat responses.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/brief-chill-or-sweet-amazons-alexa-plus-now-lets-you-pick-your-ais-personality

The annual app recaps for 2025: all Wrapped up

Spotify may have popularized the Wrapped user recap trend, but more companies are jumping on that bandwagon every year. From rival music streaming providers like Apple, Amazon, YouTube, and Deezer, to completely unrelated services across tech, gaming, and other industries, a huge range of companies are using fun visuals, stats, and personalization features to show how you’ve been using their platforms over the last 12 months.
https://www.theverge.com/news/837280/spotify-wrapped-2025-recap-annual-best-of-data

Amazon and Perplexity have kicked off the great AI web browser fight

Amazon doesn’t want to be a part of Perplexity’s AI-powered shopping experience. In a post on Tuesday, the ecommerce giant says it has “repeatedly requested” that Perplexity stop allowing its Comet AI browser to buy products for customers, which Perplexity has responded to by accusing Amazon of “bullying.”
https://www.theverge.com/news/813755/amazon-perplexity-ai-shopping-agent-block

Amazon outage breaks much of the internet

An outage affecting web hosting giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) has taken out vast swathes of the web, including websites, banks and some government services. The internet giant blamed the outage, which began around 3 a.m. on the U.S. east coast, on DNS, a system that converts web addresses into IP addresses so that customer apps and websites can load.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/20/amazon-dns-outage-breaks-much-of-the-internet/

Amazon is ending remote work. Its employees hope the company reconsiders

It's back to the office full time for the majority of Amazon employees across the globe, but for some who work for the tech giant and online retailer it's not a welcome change. "The people on my team are very upset about this," said CJ Felli, a system development engineer at Amazon Web Services based in Seattle. Amazon's corporate employees worked mostly remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since 2023, they were allowed to work a hybrid schedule — two days remotely and three days in the office.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/amazon-ends-remote-work-1.7422614?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Amazon Fresh kills “Just Walk Out” shopping tech—it never really worked

A May 2023 report from The Information revealed the myriad tech problems Amazon was still having with the idea six years after the initial announcement. The report said that "Amazon had more than 1,000 people in India working on Just Walk Out as of mid-2022 whose jobs included manually reviewing transactions and labeling images from videos to train Just Walk Out’s machine learning model."
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/amazon-ends-ai-powered-store-checkout-which-needed-1000-video-reviewers/