Alexa+, Perplexity Comet and a new app from Instagram?
Plus: Claude Code, New AI research, How to develop your executive presence remotely
Hi product people 👋, a warm welcome to the 283 new subscribers who joined us since last week!
Coming up in today’s Product Briefing, we take a look at the new AI-powered version of Alexa and the potential opportunities this brings for product teams, as well as a new browser announcement from Perplexity and shifts in AI pricing strategies post-Deepseek.
Plus, a tool that allows you to learn more about the UX of notifications in product design and how they impact user behaviour, the latest studies on AI in the workplace and a cautionary tale about one Disney employee who downloaded an open source AI tool - with dire consequences.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
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Key reads and resources for product teams
New from the Department of Product this week:
Knowledge Series - The AI Playground Part 2 - 10 more ways to get hands on AI experience
Prep for a live interview with Google Gemini Live voice mode, create data visualizations, write a customer needs report with Perplexity, stay CCPA / GDPR compliant using reasoning models. These practical examples designed specifically for product teams should help you both keep up to date - and get ahead at work. (Department of Product)
UX - Notifications Psychology Tool
This mini game will help you to understand the techniques that make notifications impossible to ignore. Developed by Rohan Dehal, this free interactive game is designed to help you understand how different notification patterns drive different behaviors in users. (Product Artistry)
Trends - What is vibe coding?
Developers are embracing a new way of building software that’s more conversation than code. But is it more mayhem than magic? (Figma Blog)
Skills - How to develop your executive presence when working remotely
If you’re a leader or aspire to be one, you’ve probably thought about how you project confidence and competence - or, what some call your executive presence. Harvard Business Review speaks to Megan Bock and Laura Sicola on the key elements of executive presence and how to develop it while working remotely. (Harvard Business Review)
Strategy - How Amex became Resy’s secret weapon for product growth
Find out how Resy, snapped up by American Express in 2019, leverages Amex’s massive $100 billion cardholder dining spend to supercharge its growth. Discover how Resy’s two-sided marketplace equips restaurants with savvy subscription tools while drawing in Amex’s elite diners through features like the Discover tab. (YouTube)
Design - The surprising patterns behind viral AI products
The best AI-native products don’t just deliver powerful automation. They guide users through a seamless, intuitive, and trustworthy experience—one where AI feels like an assistant rather than a guessing game. (Kyle Poyar)
New product features and innovation this week
Amazon unveiled the latest iteration of Alexa. The new AI-powered version is called Alexa+ and ships with new abilities including integrations with other Amazon products like Ring, natural, flowing conversations getting things done on your behalf e.g. date planning / gift shopping and jumping to your favorite scene in a Prime movie. It’s priced at $20 a month but will be free for Prime customers.
If it's as impressive as the demos look, perhaps this is the first step towards a fully fledged AI home companion. Alexa+ is already connected to hundreds of APIs so the best part is that product teams won’t need to build “Skills” for it.
Despite all this, voice-only as a platform is still difficult; even with these new features, how often are users really likely to use Alexa as a voice assistant? In its 10+ years since launch, Alexa has developed a reputation as a product used only for simple tasks like setting timers and alarms, but perhaps the recent shift towards conversational voice input for AI products will help drive further adoption.
Anthropic has launched Claude Code - a new command line tool that competes directly with the likes of GitHub Copilot and others. Built on the new Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, it lets teams edit files, run tests, manage git operations, and understand their codebase using plain language instructions. It uses a ‘hybrid reasoning’ approach and can enter an “extended thinking” phase when a developer wants deeper logic.
Google has responded with an announcement that it is making Gemini Code Assist free with 180,000 code completions.
Meanwhile…
Trello is getting a major update that transforms it into a personal to-do task app with a new inbox that lets you organize all of your to-dos in one place.
Perplexity has launched an API version of Deep Research. The company’s CEO suggested the API endpoint could be used to build a “McKinsey Consultant or VC as a Software" and is offering free credits to any teams willing to build it. This week, they also teased a new browser called Comet which they describe as a “browser for agentic search”. With Arc seemingly ditching its own browser last year, maybe Perplexity can pull this off.
After hiking prices for 365 customers to bundle in Copilot, Microsoft announced this week that it is now offering Copilot’s Voice and Think Deeper features for free. The arrival of cheaper models like Deepseek is forcing companies to lower prices and re-think their pricing strategy. Meta has previously signalled that once its AI tool hits a billion users it will monetize via ads. Other products could follow suit.
Instagram is considering launching a standalone Reels app. As AI makes it easier than ever to build features - this risks feature bloat. Could app unbundling be one way to address this?
Google Drive is getting searchable transcripts. The transcript appears in a sidebar next to the video player and highlights the currently spoken text.
In other news…
ElevenLabs has released a new product called Scribe - the world’s most accurate speech to text model. It was tested on the world’s fastest speaker and performed remarkably well. This past week, ElevenLabs ran a hackathon in London and SF with the top six products built including an AI agent that calls businesses on your behalf and a copilot to keep drivers awake at the wheel.
How to build AI products for enterprise customers
Tools you can use
Monocle - remove distractions by blurring everything apart from your active window.
Mark - an AI bookmark that remembers everything.
Bridgetown Research - conduct market analysis in seconds.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
More than 1 billion people are now watching podcasts on YouTube every month. Spotify last reported that it had just 100 million in 2023 - a figure that’s likely grown since then but missing YouTube’s 1 billion by some margin. But… YouTube’s revenue per thousands engagement hours are substantially lower than competitors according to this analysis:
Claude took a novel approach to measuring the effectiveness of its new model 3.7: it used Pokemon as a benchmark. Claude 3.7 beats all other models on the standardized SWE-bench test with a score of 70.3%.
Employees are three times more likely to be using gen AI today than their leaders expect. Latest report from McKinsey on Gen AI Adoption.
99% of university students in the UK are now using AI for assessments, up from 53% in 2024.
200,000 JP Morgan employees now have access to a custom-built AI tool. Most American workers, 63%, say they don’t use AI at work at all.
Wearables are growing faster than gym or fitness class spending. Users spent 52% more YoY on the sleep and activity tracking Oura Ring in 2024.
Since ChatGPT’s launch, edtech company Chegg has lost more than half a million subscribers and Its stock is down 99% from early 2021, falling from $14 billion in February 2021 to just $191 million in November 2024.
Other product news in brief
😬 A Disney worker lost his job after downloading an Open Source AI tool - with dire consequences.
💰 OpenAI’s Mira Murati’s new startup is valued at $9 billion
🤖 Zoom’s CTO says it developed a Small Language Model to help its AI companion perform “agentic” tasks in a cost effective way.
📺 Apple has launched a series of productivity playlists inspired by the TV show Severance
Paid subscribers get the full DoP Substack including: The Knowledge Series for sharpening their tech skills, AI tutorials for putting AI into practice at work and DoP Deep dive reports to learn from the world’s top tech companies.
Alexa+ sounds promising especially with its new conversational capabilities. But with voice assistants struggling to break out of basic utility tasks for years, it'll be interesting to see if this shift finally changes user behavior. Do you think Alexa+ can become a true daily assistant or will it still be limited to timers and weather updates?