Between hopes and delays, Amazon is struggling to relaunch Alexa – Les Alexiens

Once a pioneer, Alexa’s AI today seems a little outdated and is struggling to catch up with its new competitors. Despite promises of improvements last year, Remarkable Alexa is still not available and, for the first year since its launch, Amazon did not present any news regarding its voice assistant last September. Last Thursday, during the presentation of Amazon’s results, Andy Jassy, ​​however, said he was confident in its future and briefly discussed its next developments.

Remarkable Alexa: a project that drags on

First introduced by Jeff Bezos in 2014, Alexa quickly established itself as the first voice assistant integrated into a smart speaker, revolutionizing the way we interact with our devices and connected homes. But, almost ten years after its introduction, Alexa currently finds itself in a difficult situation. Between intensifying competition and technical challenges, Amazon seems to be struggling to develop its assistant and catch up with its new competitors, the famous generative AI which has been the talk of the press for 2 years.

In April 2023, Andy Jassy, ​​the current CEO of Amazon, promised us a major evolution with the development of a new large language model (LLM) capable of making Alexa “the best personal assistant in the world”but it is clear that, a year after its convincing presentation, things have not changed one iota for users and Remarkable Alexa remains a promise still unfulfilled.

As a reminder, Remarkable Alexa designates the future AI which should make the voice assistant more conversational and contextual, allowing extended dialogues, simultaneous actionsand intelligent automations adapted to user habits. Amazon plans to offer it through a subscription of $5 to $10 per month that will offer advanced features. This update aims to compete with other voice assistants such as Siri which will soon integrate ChatGPT and Google Assistant which should logically be closer to Gemini in the long term. But among the competition too, we are still only at the stage of promises.

An aborted attempt at improvement

Last summer, Andy Jassy, ​​the current CEO of Amazon, set out to test an improved Alexa prototype with a Generative AI rivaling ChatGPT. A fan of the New York Giants and investor in the Seattle Kraken hockey team, Jassy pushed the assistant to his limits by asking him pointed questions about his favorite sports, going so far as to ask him for player performance statistics and statistics. match results. The answers were apparently quite convincing, suggesting some potential, but they were often too long and sometimes off-topic. Even more problematic, Alexa’s new AI would have had more difficulty executing basic commands, sometimes taking several seconds to activate a connected object. In other words, AI would have progressed on one side, but regressed on the other, but we must not forget that users mainly use their voice assistant to control devices in their connected home and that home automation has always been a strong point of Alexa compared to its competitors.

Ultimately, while Remarkable Alexa was to be presented on October 17, the project schedule has lengthened considerably, according to Bloomberg, which revealed on Wednesday that Andy Jassy would have finally given his teams more time to refine the generative AI of Alexa, pushing the project deadline 2025. Indeed, as we mentioned at the beginning of September, even though the Alexa AI teams had been working for months on a new LLM, the main leaders of the project would have changed strategy along the way and decided to integrate Claude AI, a Generative AI designed by Anthropic, a company in which Amazon has invested $4 billion.

The future of Alexa: a drifting AI project or a future leader?

Some Amazon employees point to bureaucracy and the weight of management layers as an obstacle to Alexa’s progress. Jassy himself, in a memo dated September 16, criticized the “preliminary meetings to decision meetings” which slow down the decision-making process. But the problem seems to go further. While the company has historically established itself as a pioneer in sectors such as video streaming or online sales, Alexa’s delay in the face of current competition in AI seems symptomatic of a lack of clear vision. Once ahead of its competitors, Amazon now finds itself in a situation of catching up, which does not seem to worry its CEO who was confident last Thursday during the conference call on the results for the third quarter of 2024.

“I think the next generation of these generative AI assistants and applications will be more effective not only in answering questions and summarizing, indexing and aggregating data, but also in making decisions »declared Andy Jassy, « eYou can imagine we’re pretty good at this with Alexa. » Rather reassuringly, the manager explained that his teams continued to “reorganize the brain” of the voice assistant with “a new set of core models” and that these new features should be revealed “in the near future”. For those who, like us, were hoping to discover them on the occasion of Alexa’s tenth anniversary, it was a failure, we will have to wait another year.

Regardless, Amazon now faces a major challenge. In a context of fierce competition in AI, Alexa is undeniably in decline and its future prospects still remain uncertain. Fortunately, Amazon’s teams seem to have taken the subject in hand and, if they manage to quickly offer a voice assistant with powerful and intuitive AI, Alexa could once again become the market leader. Otherwise, it risks being relegated to the ranks of large-scale technological failures.