Amazon’s voice-powered digital assistant, Alexa, is getting an AI makeover, but the company admits that the process has been difficult and there is no definitive launch date as yet.
In recent months, Amazon has pumped another $4 billion into AI wunderkind Anthropic. But it was the launch of Amazon’s Nova family of AI models that prompted questions as to when Alexa would get her generative AI glow-up.
Rohit Prasad, who leads the artificial general intelligence (AGI) team at Amazon, has now admitted that the process to update Alexa is still ongoing – and there is no end in sight.
Technical Hurdles Still To Solve
The Financial Times is the latest title to report on Amazon’s Alexa problems in a detailed interview with Prasad in which he admits that the bid to give Alexa generative AI abilities has been on the go since around 2022.
However, it has been a difficult process with hallucinations, latency, and efficiency issues all proving tricky to solve. This echoes a report from Bloomberg in October 2024 that indicated the upgrade would have to be kicked into 2025.
This just in! View
the top business tech deals for 2025 👨💻
Now, it seems Alexa’s users will have to wait even longer for their new-and-improved, AI-powered home assistant.
The FT spoke to previous employees who had worked on the project and they pointed to compatibility issues with the original technology that Alexa was built upon.
Created using technology from a company called Evi, which Amazon bought in 2012, this historical tech is proving to be difficult to combine with the company’s new LLMs. Compared to the firm’s contemporary AI machinery, Alexa is built on relatively rudimentary and simple algorithms. In a product development context, it’s far from a match made in heaven.
The retention of features and functions that Alexa delivers from 500 million devices worldwide is a practical non-negotiable, so integrating the kind of generative AI features needed to take the offering up a notch has simply made delays inevitable.
Web of Third-Party Players Slows Down Development
In order to turn Alexa from her original persona – answering basic queries and accessing services like Amazon Music – to an “agentic” product or personalized concierge also involves scores of third parties. The FT piece suggests that this additional stumbling block has delayed the process further.
It makes sense that Amazon has had to bring in outside help. The company has made dramatic cuts to its workforce in 2023, with reports suggesting that this could be a boon for third-party hardware makers. This could also have had an impact on Amazon’s need for third-party software and specialist developers, especially for such a complex project.
Is Amazon Falling Behind?
This latest interview comes as fears abound that Amazon has really fallen behind competitors when it comes to generative AI. The release of the Nova models is certainly a step in the right direction, but some argue that the company should really be leading the field in conversational AI.
When it comes to Alexa, there are still many questions to be answered. For instance, considering the project has been pushed back multiple times and clearly caused Amazon more problems than it was expecting, will the shiny new AI-powered version of the company’s home assistant come with fees attached when it’s eventually released, as Amazon attempts to recoup some of the costs?
According to the FT, who spoke to a former employee, there could be a subscription model enforced. Alternatively, Amazon could “take a cut of sales of goods and services”. Whatever the final decision, it seems the roll-out may be a while off, which means Amazon has plenty of time to tackle the smaller details.