Amazon is reportedly heavily delaying its up-to-date Alexa

In the voice assistant arms race, the leader may soon be last to arrive. Balmy on the heels of Apple revealing a up-to-date Siri powered by ‘Apple Intelligence’ at WWDC 2024 new report from Fortune points out that Amazon’s Alexa – arguably the most capable of current voice assistants – is struggling with its own generative AI metamorphosis:

…no source Fortune interviewed, we believe Alexa is close to fulfilling Amazon’s mission of being “the best personal assistant in the world,” not to mention Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ vision of creating a real-life version of the useful Star Trek computer. Instead, Amazon Alexa risks becoming a cautionary digital relic – a potentially game-changing technology stuck in the wrong game.

Long report (which is paid, but distributed entirely on Yahoo Finance) is based on interviews with a dozen former employees who told stories of organizational dysfunction coupled with technological challenges that led the company to give up its chance to dominate artificial intelligence. Fortune reports that Amazon has responded to these claims by saying that the data provided by employees is archaic and does not reflect the current state of the company Alexa LLC.

However, it looks like things aren’t going smoothly for the up-to-date improved Alexa. The more conversational, context-aware voice assistant that the company demonstrated at its fall hardware event last year still hasn’t been made available beyond a circumscribed preview. And according to Fortune reporting while Amazon may eventually launch better Alexa based on LLMit won’t be even close to what it could be.

Many former employees he talked to, among others: Fortune they said they left in part because they believed the up-to-date Alexa would never be ready or would already be overtaken by the competition if and when it came to market. Its biggest weakness compared to companies like OpenAI and its attention-grabbing ChatGPT is that it must “navigate the existing technology stack and defend the existing feature set,” according to Fortune.

Basically, the ancient Alexa gets in the way of the up-to-date Alexa. FortuneAmazon sources say Amazon hasn’t yet figured out how to combine what Alexa can do now with the capabilities it touted for the up-to-date Alexa last fall – a better, smarter and more conversational assistant. Said one of the workers Fortune that the message to the company after the demo event was that “we need to basically burn the bridge with the old Alexa AI model and focus solely on working on the new one.”

According to Fortune, Amazon has struggled with ensuring that Alexa LLM will consistently and efficiently make API calls, which is how the current Alexa interacts with other devices such as third-party intelligent home devices and music services. She also had difficulty training LLM to understand natural language because, although she has millions of devices in the wild, her clients have learned to speak “Alexa language” and not interact conversationally with the device.

Another reported obstacle is Amazon’s decentralized organizational structure, in which the thousands of people working on Alexa are divided into several teams, causing friction and frustration. Mihail Eric, a researcher who left the company in 2021, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that he blames the failure of his work on Alexa on the company’s organizational chart and insistence that research be tied to product launches – work that he claims “if done correctly, could have been the genesis of Amazon ChatGPT (long before releasing ChatGPT).”

For its part, Amazon says it remains committed to developing its voice assistant. “Our vision for Alexa remains the same – to build the best personal assistant in the world,” said Amazon’s Kristy Schmidt Edge in response to Fortune 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 are working hard to roll out at scale – to the more than half a billion Alexa-enabled devices already in homes around the world – to enable even more proactive, personal and trusted support for our customers. We are excited about what we are building and can’t wait to deliver it to our customers.”

Whatever mistakes it has made in the past, it’s clear that Amazon is rushing to catch up. Former head of facilities and services Dave Limp left shortly after this fall’s event. His successor — Panos Panay, a former Microsoft chief product officer — has been in the role for just over six months. Fall 2024 is just around the corner. Let’s see if Amazon can deliver on any of its promises.