If you’re wondering what happened to the new and improved version of Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, you’re not alone. Bloomberg reported that the new Alexa remains in the development stage, with Amazon blocking access to the beta stages, including the new “Let’s Chat” stage. As a result, the launch scheduled for late 2024 has been postponed to next year.
The problem seems to be with the Large-Scale Language Model (LLM). The new Alexa is designed to understand more complex questions from users, but some of the most basic things that older versions were able to do very easily, like creating timers and controlling smart lights. is likely to fail, according to a follow-up report on the verge of failure.
Amazon originally planned to announce a new version of Alexa AI in October, but that plan has been pushed back to next year. (As you may have noticed, October is over.) The original timeline was to premiere the next evolutionary step in Alexa’s evolution on October 17th, but Amazon changed course. We decided to use that date to unveil our new line of Kindle e-readers. Then, in August, news surfaced that the new Alexa would be powered by Anthropic’s Claude AI and would come with a monthly subscription fee.
When ChatGPT started gaining popularity in the summer of 2023, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wanted to see if Alexa could compete if the AI was upgraded. Jassy reportedly started asking Alexa sports questions “like an ESPN reporter at a playoff press conference,” but the answers were “far from perfect.” That added to Jassy’s recent game score.
Nevertheless, Alexa has passed enough stages that Jassy and his fellow executives felt engineers could build a beta version by early 2024. Unfortunately, Amazon was unable to meet the deadline.
Even with the new deadline, there’s still a long way to go to resolve the issues with the new Alexa. Some employees told Bloomberg that the problem beyond Alexa’s internal structure lies in Amazon’s overreaching management team and lack of a “compelling vision for AI-powered Alexa.” .
