In the voice assistant arms race, the front-runner may end up last. Shortly after Apple unveiled a new Siri with “Apple Intelligence” at its WWDC 2024 conference, New reports luck This shows that Amazon’s Alexa, arguably the most capable voice assistant today, is struggling to transform its own generative AI.
…any source luck Those interviewed believe Alexa is closer to achieving Amazon’s mission of being “the world’s best personal assistant” — not to mention Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ vision of building a real-life version of a useful Star Trek computer — but Amazon’s Alexa risks becoming a digital relic with the lesson of a potentially game-changing technology stuck in the wrong game.
A long report (paid) Read the full article on Yahoo Finance), based on interviews with more than a dozen former employees, tells how a combination of organizational dysfunction and technical challenges caused the company to miss out on an opportunity to dominate AI. luck Amazon reportedly responded to these claims by saying the details provided by employees were out of date and didn’t reflect the current situation. Alexa LLM.
But things aren’t going smoothly for the new and improved Alexa: The more conversational, context-aware voice assistant that the company demoed at its hardware event last fall has yet to roll out beyond limited previews. Fortune According to reports, Amazon eventually Better LLM-based Alexait’s not going to be anywhere near what it should be.
Many of the former employees interviewed luck One reason they left was because they believed the new Alexa would never be ready, or that if it did launch, it would be overtaken by competitors. The company’s biggest weakness, he said, is that it “has to navigate an existing tech stack and defend an existing feature set,” compared to companies like OpenAI and its high-profile competitor ChatGPT. luck.
Essentially, your old Alexa is getting in the way of your new Alexa. luckSources said Amazon has yet to figure out how to combine the new Alexa features it unveiled last fall — a better, smarter, more conversational assistant — with current Alexa features. luck The internal message after the demo event was that we needed to essentially burn our bridges with the old Alexa AI model and pivot to work exclusively on the new model.
Amazon’s message was, “You basically need to cut bridges with the old Alexa AI model and pivot to work exclusively on the new model.”
according to luckAmazon has been working to ensure that the Alexa LLM can consistently and effectively make API calls, which is how Alexa currently interacts with other devices, such as third-party smart home devices and music services. They also struggled to train the LLM to understand natural language, because while there are millions of devices in the wild, customers are trained to speak “Alexa language” and don’t interact with devices conversationally.
Another reported stumbling block is Amazon’s decentralized organizational structure, with thousands of people working on Alexa siloed across multiple teams, causing friction and frustration. Mikhail Eric, a research scientist who left the company in 2021, said: I wrote to X (formerly Twitter) He blames the failure of his work on Alexa on the company’s organizational chart and relentless research tied to product launches. He claims that the work “could have been the origin of Amazon ChatGPT if done correctly (long before ChatGPT was released).”
Meanwhile, Amazon said it remains focused on growing its voice assistant. “Our vision for Alexa remains the same: to build the world’s best personal assistant,” Amazon’s Christy Schmidt said. The Verge In response to Fortune Article “Generative AI offers a huge opportunity to make Alexa even better for customers. We’ve already integrated generative AI into various components of Alexa, and we’re hard at work implementing it at scale to the more than 500 million ambient Alexa-enabled devices already installed in homes around the world. This will enable even more proactive, personal, and reliable support for our customers. We’re excited about what we’re building and look forward to bringing it to our customers.”
Whatever past missteps, it’s clear that Amazon is rushing to catch up. Its former head of devices and services, Dave Limp, resigned shortly after that fall event. His replacement, Panos Panay, a former chief product officer at Microsoft, has been on the job for just over six months. Fall 2024 is just around the corner. We’ll see if Amazon can deliver on its promises.