That, in turn, was resulting in a more bloated technology stack while creating internal politics for the team, this person said.Īnother person said that, meanwhile, some were questioning the entire premise of charging for Alexa. One of the people said the Classic Alexa team, for example, wanted to protect their work by insisting on using what they built for the old Alexa. There's also growing debate over the direction of the project. One of the people said Amazon's decision to move to a new technology stack for Alexa was largely because of the "legacy constraints" that came with Classic Alexa. The people said that enabled better reasoning over a complex set of data and interaction history, delivering a much more personalized experience. But the new Remarkable Alexa follows a more centralized structure, where language understanding and response generation use a single language model. The old Alexa, internally dubbed "Classic Alexa," was based on a natural language model that kept context history and personalization signals distributed across different parts. They said one way Amazon was addressing this issue was by completely revamping Alexa's technology stack. The new Alexa still didn't meet the quality standards expected for Alexa Plus, these people added, noting the technical challenges and complexity of redesigning Alexa. It also needed to improve its ability to answer ambiguous customer requests that require the engagement of multiple services, such as turning on the light and music at the same time. The people familiar with the matter said the limited preview with 15,000 external customers discovered that, while Remarkable Alexa was generally good at being conversational and informative, it was still deflecting answers, often giving unnecessarily long or inaccurate responses. Internally, however, Amazon isn't satisfied with the performance of the new Remarkable Alexa yet. Amazon's former hardware and devices boss, Dave Limp, also said the company would have to start charging for the more advanced version of Alexa at some point, given the high cost of running AI models. Some parts of the new AI-powered Alexa were showcased during Amazon's hardware event last year. Alexa has the third-largest projection, at 75.6 million users. In the US, Google Assistant is on pace to have 88.8 million users this year, followed by Siri's 84.2 million, according to Insider Intelligence. Not meeting the quality standardsįor Alexa, the change comes at a critical moment, as the voice assistant has fallen behind competitors such as Google and Apple in recent years. "If this fails to get revenue, Alexa is in trouble," one of the people told BI.Īmazon declined to comment. The new subscription plan, which is set to be backed by a superpowered version of Alexa, represents Amazon's latest attempt to revive the voice technology that was once considered the key to its future. Their identities are known to BI.ĭespite its early success in becoming a household name, Amazon's Alexa voice assistant has struggled to build a feasible business model, leading to major layoffs and cost-cutting measures over the past year. The people who spoke to BI requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. Amazon is now going through a major overhaul of Alexa's technology stack to address this issue, though the team is experiencing some discord. It often indicates a user profile.īut the quality of the new Alexa's answers is still falling short of expectations, often sharing inaccurate information, external tests have found. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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