In the week’s least surprising news, Amazon’s reinvention of its Alexa voice assistant has reportedly fallen even further behind. According to Bloomberg, the launch of a new Alexa — billed as a smarter, more capable AI-powered voice assistant — has been pushed back. Again. “A person familiar with the matter said Alexa AI teams were recently told that their target deadline had been moved into 2025,” writes Bloomberg.
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 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.
Bloomberg reports that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has yet to convey a compelling vision for an AI-powered Alexa to the company. While he’s said publicly, “We continue to re-architect the brain of Alexa … ”, there’s been scant information about what an LLM-powered Alexa will bring to its millions of users — beyond being able to converse more naturally. More importantly, it seems Amazon has yet to prove it can do this without diminishing the features customers use the assistant for every day.
While the company searches for its vision, Jassy has installed a new head of the devices and services division under which Alexa falls. Panos Panay has been at the company for a year now, and Bloomberg reports the former head of Microsoft’s Surface division has “brought a focus on higher-quality design to a group adept at utilitarian gadgets.”
Amazon’s prior tact of making copious amounts of cheap hardware at the expense of better software is partly why Alexa hasn’t gotten measurably smarter over the last decade. However, with better hardware and a focus on building on Alexa’s strength, rather than simply turning it into a chatbot, the company could recapture Jeff Bezos’s original vision of creating Star Trek’s “Computer.” But whatever the plan is for a new Alexa, it looks like it won’t be here anytime soon.