Amazon was planning to release a new Alexa based on generative AI in October 2024, but this obviously did not happen. According to reports that appeared at the time, the company postponed the release of the new voice assistant to this year. Now, a new report by The Financial Times says that the company still has to overcome “several technical hurdles” before launching a more powerful version of Alexa. One of the main problems that needs to be solved is “hallucinations” – incorrect or false results that generative artificial intelligence sometimes produces.
Hallucinations need to be “close to zero,” Rohit Prasad, head of Amazon’s artificial general intelligence (AGI) team, told the FT. Since people tend to use Alexa throughout the day, it could end up spitting out a lot of false information if Amazon doesn’t address this problem. Prasad admits that hallucinations are “still an open problem in the industry,” but his team is “working extremely hard on it.” Amazon also needs to work on the speed or latency of Alexa’s response, as users expect to get an answer quickly after they ask the assistant a question or ask it to perform a task.
The head of Amazon AGI said that it was very difficult to bring Alexa to the last mile. “Sometimes we underestimate how many services are integrated into Alexa, and it’s a huge number,” he told FT. His team has to make sure that the new assistant can work with hundreds of third-party applications and services. The new Alexa is expected to be powered by Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence and Amazon’s own Nova models, and it will reportedly require a subscription so that the company can make money. But it still doesn’t have an exact release date, and judging by what a current employee of the company told the publication, it won’t be coming anytime soon. According to them, Amazon still has a lot to do, such as making sure it works “almost 100 percent of the time,” adding child safety filters, and testing various integrations with Alexa.
