On November 6, 2014, Amazon Alexa was introduced together with the first Amazon Echo speaker. The voice assistant is facing strong competition from sophisticated AI systems such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini as it nears its tenth anniversary.
According to a recent Bloomberg story, “technical challenges” have caused Alexa’s planned update to be postponed until 2025. The initial idea was to deploy a beta version of this updated assistant earlier this year, and Alexa 2.0 was supposed to be released concurrently with the new Kindle devices that were released last month. But these plans have also been delayed, and a new target date has been set for an undisclosed period in 2025. With rivals like Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and ChatGPT growing in power, Amazon understands that Alexa is falling behind.
Integrating generative AI capabilities into Alexa is a challenging task, particularly given that it runs on around 500 million devices. It is not an easy undertaking to implement a complete update across all of these platforms.
According to the article, the improved Alexa that is presently in development frequently “drone[s] on with irrelevant or superfluous information” and has trouble performing simple tasks like managing smart lighting systems. According to insiders, there is still a long way to go before a ChatGPT-like experience is achieved, with recurring glitches and hallucinations impeding development.
Furthermore, there have been talks about Amazon potentially using a different AI model to improve Alexa, much like Apple has done with ChatGPT in Siri. Other major issues with Alexa’s development include “management bloat” and a lack of a defined goal. As a result, even for consumers who own expensive Alexa speakers, it might be a while before they encounter a genuinely sophisticated AI assistant that can rival its more inventive peers. As a result, many users are under pressure to make improvements as the digital world develops further.