More than 75 million people use Alexa, but according to Amazon’s standards, this service is a complete failure. The problem is that Alexa doesn’t generate any profits and is a significant burden on the company’s resources. It turns out that Amazon has an ultimate plan to save its digital assistant by adding new features and charging fees for its usage – but the prospects aren’t looking too good.
According to a report published on Thursday by Business Insider, the mysterious new version of Alexa barely works due to flaws in artificial intelligence and technology. This has caused tensions within the company, especially because many Amazon employees don’t believe people will be willing to pay for using this service.
The new service has a temporary name, “Alexa Plus,” and even has a set release date of June 30, as reported by Business Insider. However, it seems that meeting this deadline will be challenging.
Amazon is testing a foundational technology called “Remarkable Alexa” with the participation of 15,000 customers (if you’re one of them, we’d love to hear from you). Employees who spoke to BI said that the tests show Remarkable Alexa excels at holding conversations but struggles to accomplish anything useful.
The new version of Alexa provides very long and often inaccurate responses and has difficulties with more complex requests that require collaboration with multiple services (e.g., playing the song “Paranoid Android” and turning off the lights).
In addition to the typical challenges associated with artificial intelligence, the new Alexa requires a significant shift in both the company’s strategy and underlying technology. Some long-time Alexa employees are not happy about this. According to BI, the team that built the original Alexa doesn’t want to let go of their creation and has forced Amazon to maintain part of the original technological stack, which makes the new Remarkable Alexa sluggish and harder to handle.
There are also people who aren’t convinced about the entire project. The number of services Amazon wants to add to customers’ monthly bills is constantly growing. Of course, there’s Prime, but Amazon also promotes various streaming services, Audible, and much more. According to BI informants, many people don’t think the company will be able to convince its customers to pay a fee for using the smart speaker on top of existing costs.
This potentially doomed initiative is a response to the growing pressure to make a splash in the artificial intelligence industry. Google, Apple, and Amazon have invested billions of dollars in developing smart assistants, a technology that was supposed to be the future of computing. Years later, this project hasn’t brought any significant revenue. Silicon Valley generally considers Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri as misguided investments, and the teams working on smart speakers have particularly felt the impact of layoffs and budget cuts in recent years. After all the hype surrounding them, the tech industry doesn’t want to part ways with them.
Now there’s a renewed interest in these assistants as a way to interface with next-generation artificial intelligence. Amazon and Apple, in particular, have to catch up in this field after Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have taken the lead in AI breakthroughs. Amazon has developed its own AI models to compete with ChatGPT, which the company calls Q, and has officially begun working on even more ambitious models.
Adding artificial intelligence to digital assistants is a natural step, and if Amazon can do it in a way that makes Alexa profitable, it could solve many significant problems. However, if this plan fails, Alexa may be one step closer to its demise.
Alexa Plus FAQ
The source of the article is from the blog elblog.pl