It emerged last year that Amazon was secretly developing an upgraded version of its digital assistant, Alexa, known internally as “Remarkable Alexa” or “Project Banyan.” The revelation suggested that this enhanced tool would be capable of generating AI-based news summaries and aiding users in managing multiple tasks using artificial intelligence.
The refined Alexa launch date has been pinpointed to October 2024, with a monthly subscription fee of $10, however, Amazon appears not to have met their commitments. Various sources suggested that the product would be launched this year, but it now appears we may need to be patient for the AI-driven tool to become available.
As reported by The Financial Times, Amazon is facing multiple technical challenges, such as instances of Alexa acting unusually (hallucinations), which appear to be delaying its wide-scale distribution of the updated version of Alexa.
Initially, during the early stages of Copilot and ChatGPT, both Microsoft and OpenAI faced criticism due to their AI systems providing incorrect or misleading answers in response to queries. This stirred up a wave of controversy, leading Microsoft to implement severe adjustments such as imposing character limits to minimize the chances of the AI system generating false responses.
Speaking with The Financial Times, Rohit Prasad – Amazon’s head of artificial general intelligence for Alexa – emphasized that any potential hallucinations or errors in the updated version of Alexa must be minimal. He explained that the delay in launching the product was due to users utilizing its advanced AI features extensively throughout the day, which can sometimes result in the generation of incorrect information.
Prasad acknowledges that AI hallucinations pose a significant challenge for companies operating within the current industry. Yet, this high-ranking official asserts that Amazon is actively addressing this issue. Beyond mitigating these hallucination instances, Amazon aims to improve Alexa’s reaction time in order to provide users with a seamless interaction.
The executive admits the process is a huge undertaking:
Occasionally we overlook just how many functions are built into Alexa, and the number is truly vast. These applications receive billions of requests every week, so when you’re aiming for dependable actions that happen quickly… it’s essential to be able to accomplish this task efficiently in terms of cost.
In contrast to the widespread use of smart gadgets like Alexa-powered devices by countless households, Amazon has not been reaping substantial profits from this sector. An internal report unveiled last year disclosed that Amazon incurred losses exceeding $25 billion in its device business spanning from 2017 to 2021. These financial setbacks were observed across their Echo products, Kindles, Fire TV Sticks, and video doorbells.
Engineers working on Alexa were not reassured by the prospective launch of a paid version of Alexa by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy last year, as they felt it might not sufficiently revitalize Amazon’s struggling smart device sector.
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2025-01-15 14:39