July 10 (Reuters) - Amazon.com ( AMZN ) announced a

series of largely incremental refinements on Wednesday to

several of its artificial intelligence products as it seeks to

keep rivals at bay amid a continued investor frenzy over the

technology.

The retailer has sought to counter a perception that

competitors Google, Microsoft ( MSFT ) and OpenAI have

taken a lead in developing generative AI, which can respond

almost instantaneously with full sentences or pictures to

complicated prompts or queries.

The improvements Amazon ( AMZN ) announced at its conference in New

York include adding additional memory to so-called agents that

automate work for businesses, so that each new request can build

on prior ones, said Vasi Philomin, Amazon's ( AMZN ) vice president of

generative AI.

"This allows agents to provide more personalized and more

seamless experiences, especially for complicated tasks," said

Philomin in an interview Tuesday.

He said, for instance, that the updated AI agents could

remember for each subsequent request that a user prefers aisle

or window seats on a flight, which was not previously possible.

As well Amazon ( AMZN ) said it updated the Q chatbot it announced

last November to make improved suggestions for writing software

code, addressing one of the more popular uses for generative AI.

Amazon ( AMZN ) also said it made improvements to help customers of

its Bedrock service, which lets businesses create applications

with a range of AI models, to detect and filter out so-called

hallucinations -- when AI creates answers to questions or

requests that may be wrong or misleading.

Hallucinations have been a nagging problem in AI systems

because they breed mistrust among users. Google, for instance,

was criticized earlier this year for an AI-powered search

feature that, among other things, recommended users add glue to

pizza sauce to ensure cheese sticks to it.

The new controls will help reduce the occurrence of

hallucinations by about 75% for certain uses, Matt Wood, vice

president of AI products at Amazon Web Services, said in an

interview.

AWS, which oversees much of Amazon's ( AMZN ) AI development, is on a

pace to reach $100 billion in annual revenue, the company said

in April.