Last year, there was a pretty interesting leak about Amazon working on an updated version of its virtual assistant, Alexa. This new version had the codename “Remarkable Alexa” or “Project Banyan.” The word on the street was that this enhanced Alexa could whip up AI-generated news summaries and assist with a variety of tasks using AI.
The leak mentioned a launch date set for October 2024, with a $10 monthly subscription fee. However, Amazon hasn’t lived up to those expectations just yet. Reports suggested that the launch timeline for this upgraded Alexa was bumped to this year, but it appears that we may have to hang on a little longer for its release.
The Financial Times pointed out that Amazon is grappling with some “technical hurdles,” like hallucinations, which are apparently holding them back from rolling out the new Alexa widely.
In the early days of Bing Chat Copilot and ChatGPT, both Microsoft and OpenAI faced some heat because their AI tools were giving out incorrect or downright wrong answers to people’s questions. This situation led Microsoft to take significant steps, including setting limits on character responses, to cut down on such issues.
In a chat with The Financial Times, Rohit Prasad, who heads up Amazon’s artificial general intelligence (AGI) efforts, said that getting the revamped Alexa to drastically reduce its hallucinations is crucial. He explained the delay was partly due to users hitting the AI with all sorts of queries throughout the day, increasing the chances of misinformation.
Prasad acknowledged that AI hallucinations are a big hurdle for companies aiming to make headway in this space. However, he assured that Amazon is actively working on fixing this glitch. Besides the hallucination problem, Amazon is also focusing on speeding up Alexa’s response time to ensure users have a smoother experience.
He admitted this whole process is no small feat, saying, “Sometimes we overlook just how many services are tied into Alexa, and it’s a huge number. These applications receive billions of requests every week, so making sure they operate reliably and quickly is a big challenge… and it has to be done efficiently.”
Meanwhile, even though many households have smart devices powered by Alexa, Amazon isn’t exactly cashing in on this venture. An internal report from last year revealed that Amazon lost over $25 billion in its device segment between 2017 and 2021. These losses included products like Echo devices, Kindles, Fire TV Sticks, and video doorbells.
Although Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had considered launching a paid version of Alexa last year, it didn’t really boost the morale of the engineers involved in the project. They weren’t convinced it would be enough to pull Amazon’s device business out of the red.
