Amazon’s updated digital assistant based on generative artificial intelligence, Alexa+, has gained more than 100,000 users, CEO Andy Jassy said during a conference call on Thursday.
While this is a far cry from the 600 million Alexa devices, the company has made some progress in rolling out Alexa+, which was first introduced in February. At the time, Amazon stated that Alexa+ would be rolled out in waves over the coming months.
Amazon’s new digital assistant aims to allow users to communicate with it in a more natural style, and eventually gain agentic abilities that will allow it to use third-party applications on behalf of the user. Alexa+ should be able to generate original responses on the fly, similar to the voice modes in OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, rather than the predefined responses of the old Alexa and Siri systems.
However, as The Washington Post reported at the time of the launch, Alexa+, which launches today, lacks some key features that the company demonstrated in February. The report noted that at the time of launch, Alexa+ did not have the ability to use third-party apps such as GrubHub, generate bedtime stories for children, or brainstorm gift ideas. It is not known when these features will appear in Alexa+.
“We have a lot more functionality that we plan to add in the coming months,” Jassi said during the call.
In his opening remarks, Jassi said that Alexa+ is one of the first action-oriented AI agents for consumers. But he noted that the technology is still quite “primitive” and “inaccurate.” Currently, most multi-step AI-powered agents have a low accuracy rate of 30% to 60%, the Amazon CEO said. Jassy has set a goal for the company’s Alexa+-powered web browser agent, Nova Act, to reach 90% accuracy in this area.
The deployment of Alexa+ at Amazon seems to be going faster than the rollout of Apple’s new Siri, which is powered by LLM. When asked about the delays with the new Siri during Apple’s conference call, which was held simultaneously with Amazon’s, CEO Tim Cook said that the company needed “more time to complete the work.”
Both Apple and Amazon have reportedly encountered difficulties and delays on the road to replacing outdated digital assistants with generative artificial intelligence. Some of the biggest delays are related to getting LLM to use tools and integrate with other systems. This will allow Alexa and Siri to perform practical tasks such as setting timers and reading texts, but it has proven to be more difficult to implement than expected.
