In an arms race with voice assistants, the frontrunner may well be the last. Hot on the heels of Apple unveiling a new Siri powered by “Apple Intelligence” at its WWDC 2024 conference, a new report from Luck suggests that Amazon’s Alexa—arguably the most capable of voice assistants today—is struggling with its own generative AI makeover:
… none of the sources Luck he spoke with confidence that Alexa is close to fulfilling Amazon’s mission to be “the world’s best personal assistant,” not to mention Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ vision of creating a real-life version of the useful Star Trek computer. Instead, Amazon’s Alexa risks becoming a digital relic with a cautionary tale — of potentially game-changing technology that got stuck playing the wrong game.
The lengthy report (which is paid for but published in full by Yahoo Finance) draws on interviews with more than a dozen former employees who relay stories of organizational dysfunction combined with the technological challenges that led the company to master AI. Luck states that Amazon responded to these claims by saying that the data provided by the employee was dated and did not reflect the current status of Alexa LLM.
However, things don’t seem to be going smoothly for the new hottie Alexa. The more conversational and context-aware voice assistant that the company showed off at its fall hardware event last year still hasn’t gone beyond a limited preview. And according to Fortune’s While Amazon may eventually launch a better LLM-based Alexa, it won’t be nearly what it could be.
Many of the former employees interviewed Luck they said they left in part because they believed the new Alexa would never be ready or would already be overtaken by competitors if and when it launched. Its biggest weakness compared to companies like OpenAI and its self-titled ChatGPT is that it has to “walk through the existing technology stack and defend the existing feature set.” Luck.
Basically, the old Alexa is standing in the way of the new Alexa. LuckSources say Amazon hasn’t yet figured out how to combine what Alexa can do now with the features it touted for the new Alexa last fall — a better, smarter, conversational assistant. One employee said so Luck that the message at the company after the demo event was that “we basically have to burn the bridge with the old Alexa AI model and just focus on working on the new one”.
The message at Amazon was that “we basically have to burn the bridge with the old Alexa AI model and just focus on working on the new one.”
According to Luck, Amazon struggled to get its Alexa LLM to consistently and efficiently make API calls, which is how the current Alexa interacts with your other things, like smart home devices and third-party music services. It also has trouble training LLM to understand natural language because while it has millions of devices out in the wild, its customers have trained themselves to speak “Alexa” and not interact with the device conversationally.
Another reported obstacle was Amazon’s decentralized organizational structure, in which the thousands of people working on Alex are divided into multiple teams, causing friction and frustration. Mihail Eric, a scientist who left the company in 2021, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that he blamed the company’s organizational chart and the insistence on research to go along with bringing the product to market for the failure of his work on Alex — work that he claims. “If done right, this could have been the birth of Amazon ChatGPT (well before ChatGPT was released).”
Amazon says it remains committed to growing its voice assistant. “Our vision for Alexa remains the same – to build the best personal assistant in the world,” said Amazon’s Kristy Schmidt. The Verge in reaction to Fortune’s article. “Generative AI offers a huge opportunity to make Alexa even better for our customers. We’ve already integrated generative AI into various Alexa components, and we’re working hard to implement it at scale—in the more than half a billion Alexa-enabled ambient devices already in homes around the world—to enable even more proactive, personal, and trusted experiences. help for our customers. We’re excited about what we’re building and look forward to delivering it to our customers.”
Whatever past mistakes there are, it’s clear that Amazon is racing to catch up. Former Head of Facilities and Services Dave Limp left shortly after this fall event. His replacement – Panos Panay, a former product director at Microsoft – has been in place for just over six months. Fall 2024 is just around the corner. We’ll see if Amazon can deliver on any of its promises.