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Amazon, Google, and Apple crafted the three best voice assistants on the market. Alexa, Amazon’s assistant was slated to receive a huge generative AI make-over. However, according to a new report, Amazon is falling behind with the new Alexa.
Right now, it’s hard to say what is the best voice assistant on the market. Google Assistant was at the top of the pecking order for a while, but Google has been trimming it down in preparation for Gemini to take over. However, that process has been less than smooth.
In Apple’s camp, Siri is set to get a ton of generative AI goodness through Apple Intelligence. That’s going to make it the best voice assistant on the market, hands down. However, it’s not currently available, so it can’t wear the championship belt just yet. So, the competition is between a handicapped Google Assistant, a half-baked Gemini, the concept of a better Siri, and Alexa.
Amazon is falling behind with its new Alexa
Last Fall, Amazon held an event that was 90% about AI. During the event, the company announced a revamped Alexa that will be powered by generative AI. This technology would make it more conversational and give it the ability to generate content. Rather than being text-based, it would just be vocal. You could, for example, ask it to generate a bedtime story and read it for you.
This was exciting for many people, as it would make Alexa more useful. Also, the new Alexa would be available on a ton of Alexa devices both old and new.
Organization (or a lack thereof)
This is all good news, but when will we actually see it? The event happened about seven months ago, and we haven’t heard anything about the new feature. According to a new report, Amazon is really falling behind with its implementation of the new Alexa. As noted by Fortune, “none of the sources… believe Alexa is close to accomplishing Amazon’s mission of being ‘the world’s best personal assistant,'”
The publication interviewed several former employees, and they told Fortune some of the reasons why the e-commerce giant is trailing behind the competition. One major reason is the organization of the teams. There are thousands of people working on Alexa, but they’re all spread out among several teams. So, there’s friction and an overall lack of unity between the teams. For a company as large as Amazon, that’s not something you want to hear.
Alexa vs. Alexa
Another hurdle mentioned by former workers is something that Google is also dealing with, and that is, well, Alexa. More specifically, the current workers need to cut ties with the current Alexa before it can move on. The current Alexa was built up over nearly a decade, so there are probably millions of lines of code that the company needs to comb through. It might be much harder to implement AI into an existing product than it is to start a new one from scratch. One former employee told Fortune that they needed to “basically burn the bridge with the old Alexa AI model and pivot to only working on the new one.”
Amazon is having trouble getting the new Alexa to make the appropriate API calls and understand natural language. These are extremely important if the company wants to construct a proper Gemini/Siri competitor.
Amazon responded
While Amazon is in the middle of fumbling its game-winning product, the company still appears to be optimistic about it. Kristy Schmidt told The Verge that, “Our vision for Alexa remains the same,” she continued to say, “We have already integrated generative AI into different components of Alexa, and are working hard on implementation at scale — in the over half a billion ambient, Alexa-enabled devices already in homes around the world.”
That isn’t quite the most convincing, but it shows that the company is still working on its ambitious plans.