Rollout of upgraded voice assistant hit by delays as Big Tech group struggles to overcome technical hurdles
Alexa, Amazon's voice-powered digital assistant, is due to be relaunched as an artificial intelligence “agent” that can complete practical tasks. Photograph: iStockAmazon is gearing up to relaunch its Alexa voice-powered digital assistant as an artificial intelligence “agent” that can complete practical tasks, as the tech group races to resolve the challenges that have dogged the system’s AI overhaul.
Alexa’s redesign has been in train since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, backed by Microsoft, in late 2022. While Microsoft, Google, Meta and others have quickly embedded generative AI into their computing platforms and enhanced their software services, critics have questioned whether Amazon can resolve its technical and organisational struggles in time to compete with its rivals.
To operate as an agent, Alexa’s “brain” has to be able to call on hundreds of third-party software and services, Prasad said. “Sometimes we underestimate how many services are integrated into Alexa, and it’s a massive number. These applications get billions of requests a week, so when you’re trying to make reliable actions happen at speed ... you have to be able to do it in a very cost-effective way,” he added.
One former senior member of the Alexa team said while large language models were very sophisticated, they come with risks, such as producing answers that are “completely invented some of the time”. The original Alexa software, built on top of technology acquired from British start-up Evi in 2012, was a question-answering machine that worked by searching within a defined universe of facts to find the right response, such as the day’s weather or a specific song in your music library.
One current employee said more steps were still needed, such as overlaying child safety filters and testing custom integrations with Alexa such as smart lights and the Ring doorbell.
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