Amazon.com Inc. has rebooted Alexa with artificial intelligence.
The rollout is the biggest overhaul of the voice-activated assistant since Amazon introduced it more than a decade ago. The move is a test of whether the company and its new devices czar, former Microsoft Surface boss Panos Panay, can revitalize its most important consumer electronics franchise.
Amazon’s vision for Alexa has always been ambitious, but “until this moment – right this moment — we have been limited by the technology,” Panay, who leads the Devices & Services unit, said at an event in New York on Wednesday. Panay said teams had re-designed “all of Alexa.”
A demo video showed Alexa booking concert tickets, restaurant reservations and texting a babysitter. “She’s useful,” Panay repeated, before conducting what he said was a live conversation with the updated software. During the presentation, he demonstrated a flowing ongoing conversation — a departure from the stilted, single-question interactions Alexa users are familiar with.
Alexa-powered Echo smart speakers were the must-have gadgets of the late 2010s. The company marshaled a massive effort to capitalize on that interest, releasing a flurry of devices and seeking ways to entice the growing audience of people who interacted with Alexa to spend some money on the platform.
But shopping-by-voice was largely a dud, and other sources of revenue failed to materialize as the company had hoped. Engineers who worked on Alexa in recent years say the mood in the division soured when executives curbed hiring and then laid off thousands of workers. When OpenAI released its error-prone but uncannily human ChatGPT in late 2022, Alexa was still struggling to find new ways to engage a massive user base that mostly used the assistant as a kitchen timer and trivia machine.
Panay’s predecessor, Dave Limp, announced an AI-powered Alexa in September 2023. So confident were executives in the new version’s imminent arrival that users were invited to register their interest in getting the upgrade. Internally, Amazon was targeting a release date of early 2024 for a test version.
But the launch was delayed for about a year because the software wasn’t ready for prime time. Some early testers found the new Alexa fell short of ChatGPT, while others said the voice assistant had a tendency to drone on.
The difficulties owed partly to the finicky nature of generative artificial intelligence, which is prone to packing incorrect information into authoritative sounding replies. Amazon also struggled to adapt its software to the AI era because it was designed not to generate answers on the fly but to fetch pre-written replies from a database. In internal tests, some Alexa-powered gadgets simply stopped working as a result of the attempted switch to AI.
Internally, Amazon didn’t want to risk launching the software prematurely, figuring the company might only have one good shot at regaining Alexa’s luster for the AI age.
