For the past few years, Amazon has held a big event in September to showcase its latest hardware, and the 2023 presentation included a doozy: a new Alexa with ChatGPT-like conversational capabilities.
It was an impressive demonstration, to be sure, and outgoing Amazon hardware chief David Limp (who has since been replaced by Panos Panay, former director of Microsoft) said we would get a glimpse of the new Alexa sometime in 2024.
But as the final weeks of 2024 tick by, there’s still no sign of the so-called “remarkable Alexa,” and it’s becoming increasingly clear that the promised preview won’t happen anytime soon. early.
This news is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart speakers.
Besides the lack of a clear timeline for the new Alexa, Amazon raised eyebrows by skipping its big hardware event this year, opting instead for a scaled-down unveiling of the new Kindle models.
THE the latest news about the new version of Alexa comes from Bloombergwhich reports that the “target” window for Alexa’s “remarkable” rollout is now 2025.
THE problems with the new Alexa have already been widely reportedand the Bloomberg story highlights them once again: answers that are “nowhere as good” as ChatGPT, answers that are “smarter, but not necessarily wiser,” as well as “continuous hallucinations” that “ are not always false, but unjustified. according to the article.
Worse yet, AI-enhanced Alexa is reportedly having issues with its core smart home capabilities, such as controlling smart lights, Bloomberg reports.
Contacted for comment, Amazon provided the following statement to TechHive:
“Our vision for Alexa remains the same: to create the world’s best personal assistant. Generative AI offers a huge opportunity to make Alexa even better for our customers. We have already integrated generative AI into various components of Alexa and are working hard on implementing it at scale (in more than half a billion Alexa-enabled devices already in homes around the world) to enable even more proactive, personal and reliable support for users. our customers. We’re excited about what we’re building and can’t wait to bring it to our customers.
Amazon has publicly stated that it hopes to charge extra for ‘remarkable’ version of Alexa with revamped AI capabilities, maybe between 5 and 10 dollars a month. The “classic” Alexa would remain free.
But from January 2024, bad buzz started swirling around the new Alexaspecifying that the revamped assistant “hijacked responses” and “often gave unnecessarily long or inaccurate answers.”
Amazon is would have turned to Claude AI from Anthropic as well as Mistral’s AI technology to improve the performance of the new Alexa, but the updated assistant still doesn’t seem ready for prime time.
One of the problems is the expectation game. While people expect hallucinations and long-winded responses from ChatGPT, a similar performance from the generally reliable Alexa could be considered a “fiasco” for Amazon, Bloomberg points out.
Getting hallucination-prone LLMs to reliably work with smart device APIs is a notoriously difficult task, which is why you don’t yet see HAL-like voice assistants turning on smart lights (apart from DIY platforms such as Home Assistant).
Just think of Amazon’s rivals Apple and Google, both of which have been cautious about their smart home AI plans.
Apple new Apple Intelligence feature doesn’t come close to the Apple Home app, for example, while Google’s Gemini AI will, at least in the short term, relegated to giving automation suggestions and describing what’s happening in Nest video events.
So while Amazon’s demonstrations last year of a supercharged Alexa controlling the smart home by deciphering intentions from natural language statements (like a robot vacuum heading to the kitchen after saying “Alexa, it ‘it’s dirty here’) were convincing, they don’t. This doesn’t seem like it’s going to become a reality any time soon, or at least not yet.
