Amazon's AI-Powered Alexa Upgrade Faces Delays and Challenges

Amazon has apparently delayed the AI-powered Alexa to 2025

Amazon might be in a pickle with the promised AI upgrades to Alexa. Bloomberg reported that the company's signature voice assistant, which was supposed to get a big AI overhaul before the end of this year, will instead get that upgrade in 2025. The idea is to make Alexa smarter and more powerful by making it more conversational and capable of new things. Unfortunately, by all accounts, that isn't happening. The Bloomberg report goes on to detail the problems that the AI-enhanced Alexa is having in testing. For example, beta users reported that the AI can give long, rambling answers that aren't entirely relevant to the original query. Other alleged problems include hallucinations and, stunningly, a failure to work with connected smart devices like light switches consistently. Amazon hasn't officially confirmed any delay, but beta access has apparently been turned off, so you can't even try the more conversational Alexa in a test environment anymore. Perhaps you'll be able to use it in 2025.

Amazon Alexa is about to turn 10, but its next-gen AI upgrade may have been delayed until 2025

Amazon Alexa was originally launched alongside the very first Amazon Echo speaker back on November 6, 2014 - but as the voice assistant approaches its 10th birthday, it's struggling to keep up with next-gen AI bots like ChatGPT and Gemini. According to a new report from Bloomberg, "technical challenges" mean that Alexa's upcoming upgrade has now been pushed back to 2025. Originally, a beta version of the updated bot was planned to arrive earlier this year, Bloomberg says. There was also apparently a plan to unveil Alexa 2.0 alongside the new Kindles that appeared last month, but again the launch got pushed back. Now, some unspecified point in 2025 is the target deadline. With the likes of Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and many other bots pushing their way into every aspect of digital life, Amazon knows that it's lagging behind - Alexa has effectively been overtaken by its rivals. There's no doubt that a generative AI upgrade for Alexa is a challenge. The assistant is currently available on around half a billion devices, and rolling out an update for all of them isn't a straightforward task. Bloomberg's report says the souped up version of Alexa in testing still has a tendency to "drone on with irrelevant or superfluous information", while also struggling with basic tasks, such as switching on smart lights. While there has been some progress towards a ChatGPT-style Alexa, the sources speaking to Bloomberg say there's a long way to go, with bugs and hallucinations causing problems. There has been talk that Amazon could get help from another AI model, in the same way that Apple has supercharged Siri with ChatGPT. There's also a lack of a "compelling vision" according to insiders, with "management bloat" around Alexa another issue. So, even if you've got one of the best Alexa speakers, it looks like it's going to be a while before you get one of the best AI bots built into it.

Amazon wants to make Alexa an AI powerhouse -- new report reveals its desperate struggle to keep up

Lack of direction, outdated systems and powerful competitors As we come out of what could seemingly be called the summer of AI, it's clear that the forcefully everywhere tech of the future is here to stay. With giants like Apple and Google bringing their own AI models to the fore, we're also seeing purpose-built AI companies like OpenAI and Perplexity get larger and more integrated in other systems. And yet, one of the potential foremothers of AI remains struggling to catch up, Amazon's Alexa. A new pay-walled report from Bloomberg this week revealed that Amazon is still struggling to figure out how to make an "AI brain" work for Alexa. If you've been following the increasingly desperate attempts by Amazon to improve Alexa, much of the reporting by Bloomberg won't be a surprise. At the start of summer in June, Fortune released a similar breakdown suggesting that Amazon is miles away from getting Alexa 2.0 out of the door. At the time, Google was announcing massive improvements to its Gemini AI assistant, Apple was gearing up to reveal Siri 2.0 and Apple Intelligence and OpenAI had just announced GPT-4o. Since then, AI has only gotten more embedded or upgraded. OpenAI just released ChatGPT Search, meant to rival Google Search and Apple is just now rolling out new Apple Intelligence features including ChatGPT integration with Siri. Meanwhile, Google is expected to announce Gemini 2.0 in December. As introduced by Fortune and reiterated by Bloomberg, the failure to get a "smarter" Alexa off the ground has a myriad of fault points. One source told Bloomberg that Alexa "has more in common with an automated phone tree than AI." A new wrinkle from Bloomberg's reporting is that it sounds like Amazon leadership isn't providing a clear direction and combined with an outdate system makes it hard to move forward. According to the report, Alexa was built on a rules-based system that produced formulaic responses, which isn't the conversational assistant that Amazon seems to ultimately want. Unfortunately, those responses meant that Alexa couldn't answer off-the-cuff questions or even find sports scores for games that just happened. Interestingly, since 2023 the Alexa team has improved how Alexa works as Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy took over and gave the machine learning team some direction. That said, it has lead to a voice assistant the hallucinates, rambles, or went on strange tangents. Somehow, all of these attempts to make Alexa a better chatbot have made the voice assistant worse at managing smart home requests. At the time, it was believed Amazon would have something to ship in 2024. And Amazon did announce new generative AI skills for Alexa in January. That timeline slipped to October 2024 and since then into a vague future point in 2025. Tom's Guide reached out to Amazon for comment and will update this story if the company sends a response. In June, Amazon spokespeople told Fortune that their information was dated or disputed claims that Amazon couldn't even access AI from companies it already owned like the Claude LLM. For Bloomberg's report, it appears that Amazon was not inclined to give a comment. In the meanwhile, competitors are lapping Amazon in both the chatbot and AI-powered smart home space. As it appeared in June and now, Alexa is falling behind and it's not clear Amazon knows how or what they want the original voice assistant to be capable of doing.

Amazon is still figuring out Alexa's AI brain

A decade after making waves with its voice assistant, Alexa, Amazon (AMZN+7.02%) seems to be struggling to bring it into the generative artificial intelligence era. During the company's third-quarter earnings call, Amazon vice president of investor relations David Fildes said the company is continuing "to rearchitect the brain" of its voice assistant with a set of next-generation foundation models -- or larger models trained on broad, generalized data sets. "When we first were pursuing Alexa, we had this vision of it being the world's best personal assistant and people thought that was kind of a crazy idea," Fildes said. "And I think if you look at what's happened in generative AI over the last couple of years, I think you're kind of missing the boat if you don't believe that's going to happen. It absolutely is going to happen." By rearchitecting Alexa with its foundation models, Fildes said Amazon believes it has "an opportunity to be the leader" in the next generation of voice assistants and generative AI applications. The next generation, he said, will not only be better at answering questions and summarizing data, "but also taking actions." Fildes said Amazon would share the new models with customers soon, and that the company is "increasingly adding more AI into all of our devices," including the Kindle. Alexa AI's postponed release is due to technical challenges, Bloomberg reported earlier this week, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter. One person told the publication that Amazon's Alexa AI teams were recently told their target deadline is now in 2025. In June, Fortune reported that the AI-powered Alexa -- which Amazon demoed last September and said would be available for a free preview on its Alexa-fitted devices in the U.S. -- is not even close to being ready. Former employees told the publication that the company doesn't have enough data nor access to the chips needed to run the large language model (LLM) powering the new version of its voice assistant. The company also reportedly deprioritized Alexa AI to focus on building generative AI for its cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services. Amazon said its former employees are incorrect and uninformed on its current Alexa AI efforts, and that the Amazon Artificial General Intelligence team has access to both in-house Trainium chips and Nvidia's (NVDA+2.47%) graphics processing units (GPUs). "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," an Amazon spokesperson previously told Quartz in a statement. "We are excited about what we're building and look forward to delivering it for our customers." On Amazon's third-quarter earnings call, Jassy said Amazon has a "very deep partnership with Nvidia" and plans to "be their lead partner on most of their new chips." Production of the second version of Amazon's training chips, Trainium, will start ramping up in the next few weeks, Jassy said.

Amazon CEO hints new AI Alexa will complete your tasks

More than a year after Amazon teased a new, smarter and 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 will arrive, when he spoke during the company's quarterly earnings call on Thursday. But he did give 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." 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 flatfooted 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. 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 chairman Jeff Bezos has often talked about one-way and two-day 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 new Alexa might very well end up being the most crucial example of a one-way door at Amazon over the past decade.