More than a year after Amazon teased a new, smarter AI-powered Alexa, the world is still waiting for the product’s release.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy didn’t provide an update on when the new Alexa would arrive during the company’s quarterly earnings call on Thursday. But he did offer some details on how Amazon imagines its re-architected voice assistant will stand out from rivals—whenever it finally launches.
Action, and not just words, will be a key feature of the next Alexa, Jassy said.
“I think that the next generation of these assistants and the generative AI applications will be better at not just answering questions and summarizing the indexing and aggregating data, but also taking actions,” Jassy said. “And you can imagine us being pretty good at that with Alexa.”
Jassy here is likely referring to so-called AI agents, which not only provide you with answers but help carry out a task for you as well in an autonomous way. For Amazon, that could mean envisioning a world where Alexa might not beat ChatGPT or Perplexity AI on depth or nuance of answers to queries, but perhaps could take the lead by accomplishing priorities on a to-do list.
The Amazon CEO acknowledged that AI applications currently getting traction with users are really good at “taking large corpuses of data and being able to summarize and aggregate and answer questions.” But, he noted, they generally are not good at “taking actions for customers.”
One shot at being ‘awesome’
Amazon’s Alexa burst into consumer consciousness about a decade ago, when it was released alongside the first Echo smart speaker. Since then, Amazon and its partners have sold about 500 million Alexa-powered devices, with Jassy saying on Thursday’s earnings call that there are currently “a couple of hundred million active endpoints.”
But Amazon was caught flat-footed when ChatGPT launched and the gen AI boom erupted. Since then, the company has struggled through technological and structural hurdles that continue to delay the launch of the new Alexa, according to a recent Fortune report. Some employees have reportedly been told that their new deadline for a finished AI-powered Alexa has been pushed back into 2025, according to a new Bloomberg report.
Amazon’s top devices executive, Panos Panay, told Fortune last month that the traits of the new version of Alexa will inspire him to introduce it using such terms as “emotion” and “connection.”
“The products coming are pretty awesome,” he said.
While the continued delay in releasing the revamped Alexa doesn’t make for great optics in the media, or perhaps even internally, Jassy and other company executives might recognize the likelihood of having just one shot at reintroducing a smarter Alexa into a crowded AI landscape.
Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos has often talked about one-way and two-way doors when contemplating different decision-making timelines. The former often requires a longer timeline before deciding on a path forward or launching a product into market, because there’s likely no coming back once you cross to the other side of that door. And the launch of a new Alexa might very well end up being the most crucial example of a one-way door at Amazon over the past decade.