Amazon’s race to build an AI-based successor to its voice assistant Alexa has hit more hurdles after a string of setbacks over the past year. Employees have found that there is a long delay between asking the technology for something and the new Alexa responding or completing a task.
Employees said in an internal memo obtained earlier this month that the problem, known as tardiness, was a significant shortcoming. good luck. If released, consumers could be disappointed and the product — an especially important one for Amazon as it tries to get ahead in a key battle to launch blockbuster consumer AI products — as a failure. Could be over, some employees fear.
Before the new version of Alexa launches, “latency is a significant issue that requires significant improvement,” the memo said.
The problem of latency — a common challenge when building complex creative AI applications — is just one of several concerns that Amazon employees have mentioned in internal communications over the past few months. good luck. They show the hurdles Amazon will have to clear to eventually release an updated Alexa, which is a big priority for the company because it could open a new door to selling subscriptions to access the new voice assistant. and could supercharge sales of Amazon’s Echo line of smart devices.
The updated Alexa is also a key barometer for Amazon’s standing in the race among big tech companies to dominate consumer-facing AI and the financial windfall that comes with it. Currently, many industry observers believe the company is lagging behind its contemporaries such as Google’s parent Alphabet and Microsoft as well as newcomers such as OpenAI and Perplexity AI in creating breakthrough generative AI applications for consumers. is behind
Documents obtained by good luckmore than a dozen pages in total, from August to early November. While good luck Having previously reported on Amazon’s tech and structural struggles with the new Alexa, this is the first time internal communications have surfaced highlighting key details about the project. Aside from latency concerns, they show that testers have given the technology disappointingly satisfactory scores. Some older Echo smart speakers are not compatible with the new Alexa. and disclose the names of potential external partners who will provide their services through Alexa.
However, documents are a snapshot in time and, in some cases, reflect the struggles involved in any complex and advanced technology project. Some of the issues discussed in them may already be fixed or will be before a future release.
Amazon spokeswoman Lauren Remhild said good luck In a statement, the company’s vision for Alexa is to become “the world’s best personal assistant.”
“Generative AI presents a huge opportunity to make Alexa even better for our customers, and to make Alexa even more functional and helpful on the more than half a billion Alexa-enabled devices already in the home,” he said in the statement. are working hard to provide worldwide.”
Raemhild added that some projects were reviewed. good luck It doesn’t reflect what the upgraded Alexa experience will offer when it eventually launches, but she declined to say what features she’s referring to.
Amazon first previewed a more conversational, general AI-powered version of Alexa at a press event in September 2023.
The upgrade is supposed to restore some of Alexa’s luster, which has slowly faded since it was initially received with great fanfare when it launched 10 years ago. While the company has said there are still millions of active Alexa devices, its customers continue to complain about them. A relatively common criticism is that the voice assistant doesn’t understand, or respond to requests as accurately as it once did. The original Alexa wasn’t built for natural conversations that involved back-and-forth chatter. Instead, it responds to simple questions or commands by drawing from an evolving set of predefined responses.
Most importantly, Alexa is the brains behind the Echo voice-controlled smart speakers, including the Echo Dot as well as voice-activated tablet screens, a smaller version known as the Echo Show. In total, Amazon and its partners have sold about 500 million Alexa-enabled devices, the company said.
But Amazon was caught when OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot launched in 2022, sparking an AI gold rush. Within hours, Alexa staff members began testing it and discovered that the software code they were asked to develop to control specific features of Alexa was “sometimes internal to Amazon.” was better than systems”. The Wall Street Journal Reported
After announcing plans for the new Alexa during a lavish event at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters last year, the team working on the chatbot faced a number of technical and bureaucratic issues. good luck reported earlier. For example, the company didn’t have access to enough data to feed into the new big language model needed to train Alexa. Meanwhile, employees complained that executives failed to devote enough resources to the project as they pushed work on developing general AI capabilities for the company’s cloud computing unit. Some employees also said that when silent teams within the Alexa division, such as Alexa Home or Alexa Music, want to fine-tune the new Alexa LLM for their own purposes, the overall performance of the in-development voice assistant sometimes suffers.
Internal documents obtained by good luck This month refers to a succession of at least three different target dates in 2024 for the new Alexa to be publicly announced, codenamed Vest. All of these, including the most recent incident on November 14, have since passed.
In recent months, executives from CEO Andy Jessee to new Amazon Devices boss Panos Payne have discussed the planned Alexa upgrade in general terms, but haven’t commented on when it might happen. Looking forward to the premiere.
According to a recent Bloomberg report, some employees have reportedly been told that their new deadline for AI-powered Alexa has been pushed back to 2025.
The reason for the delay is that the upgrade work is still in progress, the documents show. As recently as this month, employees reported in a document that the technology was still producing subpar results. Users who tested the new version of Alexa gave it a customer satisfaction score of 4.57 out of 7, below the company’s target of 5.5 out of 7.
In an interview, a current Amazon employee echoed insights from the initiative that the technology still needs work, including fixing the problem with delayed responses. “There are serious concerns on the delay side,” said the employee, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
The employee added that he fears that executives may feel pressured to release a new version of Alexa soon despite these concerns. If so, it would be a mistake, the employee said, because of internal concerns that he still wasn’t ready for prime time.
Another wrinkle noted by the documentation is that the new Alexa is not compatible with some older Amazon Echo devices. About 10% of people who are active users of the voice assistant through Amazon Echo devices — or 3.8 million people in total — won’t be able to access the new version through those devices.
Translation: they’ll have to buy a new Echo and upgrade or lose out.
Amazon’s marketing team plans to target these Amazon Echo owners with “recycle and save” offers aimed at getting them to buy a new device compatible with the upgraded voice assistant, the memo said. is Some Alexa users also recently received a survey, which was viewed. good luckwhich asked how likely they were to buy a new Echo device if it was “released with the latest AI technology.”
The same internal communications from August also expected users to be disappointed with the new Alexa as it will initially only have a limited selection of skills (similar to a smartphone app). According to the documents, just north of 300 skills will be available at launch, compared to the 100,000 or so available through legacy Alexa today.
The memo says the talent shortage could make it harder for Amazon to sell subscriptions to access the new voice assistant. The comment appears to confirm multiple reports that Amazon is considering charging such a fee, though other sources have said good luck That plans may change before launch.
“This presents a high risk for consumers to be disappointed by paying for a subscription and having a reduced feature set with it. [third parties]” reads the document.
In his statement, an Amazon spokesperson emphasized the complexity and difficulty of creating such an ambitious consumer product. It’s not as simple as layering a new AI model on top of the legacy Alexa service, he noted.
Raemhild said large language models, the backbone of today’s AI chatbots, are great at generating conversational exchanges or text-based content. But getting them to accurately and reliably perform actions based on customer requests without so-called “fraud” or errors is a big task.
Remhild seems to be echoing what CEO Jesse alluded to on the company’s recent earnings call: that Amazon wants the new Alexa to be more responsive to user actions. Be known as much as the encyclopedic has or maybe even more. In the knowledge AI sector, these types of products will be known as “agents”.
For this purpose, some of the documents reviewed by good luck Starting in August, a list of some of the biggest company partners plans to work with Amazon to power different user experiences for the new Alexa. The company plans to let users easily order rides through Uber and make restaurant reservations through OpenTable by making simple verbal requests through Alexa, the document said.
The memo also lists Instacart as a launch partner for grocery delivery, GrubHub for food delivery, Ticketmaster for event tickets, AtomTickets for buying movie tickets, and Thumbtack for home services. . A document notes that Amazon estimates that about 200 such partners will be added to the upgraded version of Alexa within three years after launch.
Business Insider first reported some of the partnerships.
Some of these companies previously offered their skills — or apps — through the original Alexa service, but many have pulled them back. In addition, the new integration aims to be more seamless, allowing Alexa users to make purchase or booking requests through the voice assistant in a more natural and conversational way.
Amazon spokeswoman Remhild would not confirm or deny the contributions. It’s also possible that company plans or partner lineups change before launch.
Payne, Amazon’s top devices executive, said good luck Last month that new Alexa features would prompt her to introduce using terms like “emotions” and “connections.”
“The coming products are fantastic,” he said.
Based on the company’s own internal documents reported here, there’s still significant work to be done to ensure the new Alexa meets that bar.
Are you a current or former Amazon employee with thoughts on this topic or a tip to share? Contact Jason Del Rey. jason.delrey@fortune.com, jasondelrey@protonmail.comor via Signal or WhatsApp 917-655-4267. You can also message him. LinkedIn is or on @delrey But x.
