Amazon, known for its pioneering virtual assistant Alexa, introduced the technology in November 2014. Inspired by Star Trek’s computer system on the Starship Enterprise, Alexa was meant to embody CEO Jeff Bezos' vision of a conversational and intelligent assistant.
However, recent reports suggest that despite showcasing a tech demo last year of a more contextually aware Alexa, the integration of advanced AI to make Alexa smarter remains a significant challenge.
Mihail Eric, a former Senior Machine Learning Scientist at Alexa AI from 2019 to 2021, shared insights on X (formerly Twitter) about the internal difficulties at Amazon. Eric cited "bad technical process" and a fragmented organisational structure as major obstacles. He mentioned that accessing internal data for training large language models (LLMs) was a time-consuming process, often taking weeks due to poorly annotated data and outdated documentation.
Additionally, Eric noted that multiple teams working on similar issues led to internal competition rather than collaboration, with managers often uninterested in projects that did not offer immediate rewards. Eric's experiences highlighted the systemic issues that hampered the development of an "Amazon ChatGPT" well before the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT.
A report by Fortune, based on interviews with over a dozen unnamed Amazon employees, revealed several issues affecting Alexa's AI integration. One major problem is that Alexa’s current capabilities are designed to respond in "utterances"—short prompts that limit the assistant's ability to engage in back-and-forth conversations.
This training model resulted in users adapting to give concise commands, which, while efficient, contributed to a data gap in conversational training.
Furthermore, the report pointed out that Alexa remains a financial burden for Amazon, costing the company billions annually due to its lack of monetization. In contrast, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has developed Amazon Q, an AI assistant offered to enterprises as a profitable add-on, integrated with Anthropic's Claude AI model. Despite this, Alexa's AI team has not been granted access to Claude, citing data privacy concerns.
When approached by Fortune, an Amazon spokesperson dismissed the claims as outdated and not reflective of the current state of LLM development within the Alexa division. Despite these assurances, the more conversational Alexa showcased in last year’s tech demo has yet to be released to the public.