What happened to Alexa?

At the end of 2014, Amazon introduced a new product inspired by the sci-fi onboard computer of the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek—a highly sophisticated operating system capable of natural communication. Amazon’s device was Alexa, a voice assistant integrated into a small Bluetooth speaker. Ten years later, the line has sold over 500 million devices. However, it seems that Alexa has not lived up to its initial ambitions. For some time now, there have been doubts about the service: back in 2021, Bloomberg revealed that, according to Amazon's own data, users were using Alexa less and less. This issue has become even more relevant with the success of ChatGPT and the rapid evolution of generative artificial intelligence, which has highlighted the obvious limitations of voice assistants, including Alexa.

Amazon has often succeeded in creating hugely successful products, often with foresight, investing in a sector or technology long before others, as in the cases of Kindle and the Prime service. The company took the same approach with Alexa. The public had never seen anything like it before, which is why the device was immediately well-received. Amazon presented the product as leveraging the potential of artificial intelligence: at the time, however, technological limitations did not allow for coherent sentences like those we are now used to with modern chatbots. As a result, Alexa initially relied mostly on a question-and-answer system. Amazon invested heavily in improving Alexa’s comprehension capabilities but without much success: as reported by Bloomberg, it seems that today the company is struggling to keep up with competitors, particularly OpenAI. Last year, Amazon announced it was working on a version of Alexa capable of conversing more naturally with users: the new device was expected this year, but its release has been postponed to 2025, reflecting the uncertainty within the company. At Amazon’s top levels, some believe that the project is progressing slowly due to a lack of a clear vision of what Alexa’s role should be today.

What’s Not Working with Alexa

The delays in the enhanced version of Alexa are due to several factors, but the main one is the risk that greater integration of artificial intelligence systems in the device could expose the product to further issues. Chief among these are so-called “hallucinations”—invented but seemingly accurate responses generated by chatbots. This is one of the best-known bugs in generative artificial intelligence and poses a challenge for the entire sector, but in Alexa's case, the risk is even greater. When users engage with ChatGPT, they are generally aware that the generated responses may contain errors and know they will need to “filter” the result. Alexa, however, cannot afford to “go off the rails” for several reasons: it is primarily used in family settings, often in the presence of children, and it is inherently not a free service, unlike the basic version of ChatGPT. For instance, Amazon has already sold hundreds of millions of Bluetooth speakers utilizing Alexa: thanks to its cloud-based technology, the service connects automatically to the device and does not require frequent updates. This means that regardless of the product used, users always have access to the latest version of Alexa, making it harder to justify malfunctions in the voice assistant.

Amazon began integrating artificial intelligence into its services around 2021—about a year before ChatGPT's release. At the time, however, these systems were not seen as a priority for the company, so it did not invest heavily in them. Today, Amazon is trying to catch up in the field of artificial intelligence. However, the challenges are significant: some suggest that excessive bureaucracy within the company, which even the new CEO, Andy Jassy, has not fully streamlined, is partly to blame. This same internal sluggishness led many Amazon employees to initially welcome the emergence of ChatGPT, believing it could be integrated with Alexa. However, the two products operate on very different models, and attempts to combine them have proven far more complex than anticipated. Meanwhile, Amazon's increasing investments in generative artificial intelligence, initially underestimated, have not yet resulted in significant progress for Alexa.