AI in your car? Amazon-NVIDIA deal could change driving forever

Alexa Custom Assistant is a comprehensive service that enables automakers to create their own branded voice assistant on top of Alexa+ and connect their AI agents to it.

The proposed technology combines two approaches: edge processing (which happens locally in the car for faster responses) and cloud-based capabilities for a broad selection of tasks like streaming music, booking services, and controlling smart home devices. This collaboration would enable automakers to integrate Amazon's Alexa Custom Assistant with NVIDIA DRIVE AGX automotive computing and AI infrastructure to create their own assistant that understands natural conversation and ambient context.

Alexa Custom Assistant is always ready to help

"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. They want a personalized and delightful experience from the home to the car and back," said Anes Hodžić, vice president of Amazon Smart Vehicles. “Through our work with NVIDIA, we’ve seen the extraordinary capabilities of NVIDIA’s technology when paired with Amazon’s Alexa Custom Assistant enabled by multi-modal, multi-model, and multi-agent technology stack on the edge and in the cloud. We’re so excited by its potential for auto OEMs and opportunity to keep refining the customer perception of a smart car.”

AI that understands your surroundings

"The vehicle cabin is the most demanding AI inference environment in consumer technology—real-time speech, vision language models, and multimodal reasoning, all running locally under strict privacy requirements," said Rishi Dhall, vice president of Automotive at NVIDIA. "By combining Amazon's conversational AI with NVIDIA's accelerated computing, we can deliver an in-vehicle experience that is both deeply intelligent and inherently private—exactly what automakers need to deploy AI their customers can trust.”

Alexa+ capabilities available to customers through Alexa Custom Assistant

In coordination with edge functionalities powered by the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX automotive computer platform, the Alexa Custom Assistant connects to the cloud to offer cloud-native capabilities and completes a broad selection of tasks on behalf of customers.

Cloud-based capabilities give customers access to Alexa+’s existing features in ACA such as music streaming, smart home, shopping, and services booking—all through the automaker’s own branded experience.

The collaboration is designed to give OEMs access to multimodal intelligence, including in-vehicle and cloud-based processing, that works with OEMs' existing in-vehicle infotainment systems. It is planned to be available for automaker evaluation in early 2027.