In the voice assistant arms race, the frontrunner may be on the verge of finishing last. After Apple unveiled a new Apple Intelligence-powered Siri at its WWDC 2024 conference, a new report has emerged from Fortune indicates that Amazon’s Alexa – perhaps the most capable of today’s voice assistants – is struggling with its own generative AI makeover:
…none of the sources Fortune spoke with the belief that Alexa is on the cusp of achieving Amazon’s mission of being “the world’s best personal assistant,” let alone Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ vision of being a real-life version of the helpful Star Trek computer to create. Instead, Amazon’s Alexa risks becoming a digital relic with a cautionary tale: that of a potentially game-changing technology that got stuck playing the wrong game.
The lengthy report (which is behind a paywall but published in full at Yahoo Finance) is based on interviews with more than a dozen former employees, who told stories of organizational dysfunction combined with technological challenges that led the company to lose its opportunity dared to dominate AI. Fortune reports that Amazon responded to these claims, saying the data provided by employees was dated and did not reflect the current state of Alexa LLM.
However, it seems like things aren’t going smoothly with the new souped-up Alexa. The more conversational, contextually aware voice assistant that the company demonstrated last year at its fall hardware event still hasn’t been rolled out beyond a limited preview. And according to Fortune’s While Amazon could eventually launch a better LLM-based Alexa, it won’t be close to what it could have been.
Many of the former employees interviewed by Fortune said they left in part because they believed the new Alexa would never be ready or already overtaken by competitors if and when it launched. Its biggest weakness, compared to the likes of OpenAI and its standout ChatGPT, is that it must “navigate an existing tech stack and defend an existing feature set,” according to Fortune.
In short, the old Alexa is getting in the way of the new Alexa. FortuneAmazon’s sources say Amazon hasn’t yet figured out how to combine what Alexa can do now with the capabilities it touted last fall for the new Alexa: a better, smarter and more talkative assistant. An employee told me Fortune that the message at the company after the demo event was that “we basically need to burn the bridge with the old Alexa AI model and move to just working on the new one.”
The message at Amazon was that “we basically need to burn the bridge with the old Alexa AI model and move to just working on the new one.”
According to FortuneAmazon has struggled to get its Alexa LLM to consistently and effectively make API calls, which is how the current Alexa communicates with your other things, like third-party smart home devices and music services. It also struggles to train the LLM to understand natural language because even though it has millions of devices in the wild, its customers have trained themselves to speak in “Alexa language” and not have a conversation with the device.
Another reported obstacle is Amazon’s decentralized organizational structure, in which the thousands of people working on Alexa are locked into different teams, causing friction and frustration. Mihail Eric, a research scientist who left the company in 2021, wrote on that he claims, “If done correctly, this could have been the origin of an Amazon ChatGPT (well before ChatGPT was released).”
For its part, 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 edge in response 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 several components of Alexa and are working hard to deploy at scale – across the more than half a billion Alexa-enabled devices already in homes around the world – to be even more proactive, personalized and reliable are help for our customers. We are excited about what we are building and look forward to delivering it to our customers.”
Whatever missteps there may have been in the past, it’s clear that Amazon is catching up. The former head of devices and services, Dave Limp, left shortly after that fall event. His replacement – Panos Panay, the former Chief Product Officer at Microsoft – has been in office for just over six months. The fall of 2024 is just around the corner. Let’s see if Amazon can deliver on its promises.