Amazon seeks to turn Alexa into an artificial intelligence powerhouse – new report reveals its uphill struggle to stay competitive.
Tl;dr
- AI is becoming more and more integrated thanks to giants like Apple and Google.
- Amazon is struggling to develop Alexa’s AI brain.
- Competitors are surpassing Amazon in chatbot and smart home.
The rise of AI
As we emerge from what might be called the summer of AI, there is no denying that this ubiquitous and essential technology is here to stay. Giants such as Apple et Google have put forward their own AI models, while dedicated AI companies like OpenAI and Perplexity are growing and increasingly integrating into other systems.
Amazon’s difficulties with Alexa
However, a major player in AI is struggling to keep up: it isAmazon Alexa. A new paid report from Bloomberg revealed this week that Amazon is still having trouble getting an “AI brain” for Alexa to work. If you’ve been following Amazon’s increasingly desperate attempts to improve Alexa, Bloomberg’s revelations won’t surprise you.
Earlier this summer, Fortune published a similar analysis suggesting that Amazon is far from being able to launch Alexa 2.0. Meanwhile, Google was announcing huge improvements to its Gemini AI assistant, and Apple was preparing to reveal Siri 2.0. OpenAI and Apple Intelligence had just announced GPT-4o.
Competitors are getting ahead
Since then, AI has only grown and evolved. OpenAI just launched ChatGPT Search, intended to rival Google Search, and Apple is starting to roll out new Apple Intelligence features, including ChatGPT integration with Siri. Meanwhile, Google is expected to announce Gemini 2.0 in December.
According to the Bloomberg report, Alexa was built on a rules-based system that produced form responses, which is not the conversational assistant that Amazon ultimately seems to want. Unfortunately, these responses meant that Alexa couldn’t answer impromptu questions or even find the scores of matches that had just ended.
An uncertain future for Alexa
Ultimately, all these attempts to improve Alexa as a chatbot made the voice assistant less capable of handling smart home requests. It was anticipated that Amazon would have something to ship in 2024, but that deadline was pushed back to October 2024, and then to a vague point in the future in 2025.
Meanwhile, competitors are overtaking Amazon in both chatbots and AI-powered smart homes. As seemed to be the case in June and now, Alexa is falling behind and it’s not clear that Amazon knows how or what they want the original voice assistant to be able to do.
