Amazon.com (AMZN)'s Nova Sonic Transforms AI Speech with Emotion and Timing
Tech experts strongly believe that the new tariffs could potentially slow down the AI boom.
'The AI Revolution trade would be significantly slowed down by these head scratching tariffs that NEED to be negotiated to realistic levels.'
In particular, Ives has noted how 'near-term pain' may extend longer due to the time required for manufacturing sites in the US to be built and the transition the workforce needs to be equipped with the necessary skills.
'The cost of labor is unrealistic in the U.S. to ever have semi fabs at scale,'
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Even though the Trump administration had promised to maintain the US as a leader in artificial intelligence, the newly introduced tariffs may end up having the opposite effect. This is because they are directly impacting the AI industry.
While the government may want more tech manufacturing in the US, the tariffs are undermining the fact that building and running advanced AI is very much still reliant on hardware made overseas, especially chips.
'This is becoming an explosion of global supply chain disorder and chaos. The ramifications are going to be very long and painful.'
Spectators warn that the tariff war is like a tax on the AI system in the US, making things expensive for American developers. The policy doesn't make much sense as it tends to threaten the very AI technology that it aims to protect.
Nevertheless, many others in the tech world are still quite optimistic.
'It doesn't seem to me that, of the things you could stop investing in, AI would be very high on the list. If I were a large industrial manufacturer right now, I'd be looking at ways to change my manufacturing location to lower the cost especially in a climate where there's already labor scarcity or excessive labor costs.'
For this article, we selected AI stocks by going through news articles, stock analysis, and press releases. These stocks are also popular among hedge funds. The hedge fund data is as of Q4 2024.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter's strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points ().
A customer entering an internet retail store, illustrating the convenience of online shopping.Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is an American technology company offering e-commerce, cloud computing, and other services, including digital streaming and artificial intelligence solutions.
On April 8, the company announced Amazon Nova Sonic, a new foundation model which enables more human-like voice conversations in AI applications. The innovation, aimed at simplifying the nuance and complexity of human conversation, integrates both speech understanding and speech generation into a single model. The voice model is now available via a new API in Amazon Bedrock, streamlining the development of voice applications, such as customer service call automation and AI agents across a broad range of industries.
'Nova Sonic takes a new approach to solve these challenges. Instead of using different models, it unifies the understanding and generation capabilities into a single model. This unification enables the model to adapt the generated voice response to the acoustic context (e.g., tone, style) and the spoken input, resulting in more natural dialogue. Nova Sonic even understands the nuances of human conversation, including the speaker's natural pauses and hesitations, waiting to speak until the appropriate time, and gracefully handling barge-ins.'
Overall, AMZN ranks 1st on our list of AI stocks investors are watching today. While we acknowledge the potential of AMZN as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. There is an AI stock that went up since the beginning of 2025, while popular AI stocks lost around 25%. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than AMZN but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about this .
READ NEXT: 20 Best AI Stocks To Buy Now and 30 Best Stocks to Buy Now According to Billionaires.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
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