Technical Issues and Hallucinations Postpone Revamped Alexa’s Release by Amazon

Last year, a leak spilled the beans on Amazon’s ambitious plans to overhaul its virtual assistant, Alexa, under the codename “Remarkable Alexa” or “Project Banyan.” This new version of Alexa was touted to not only generate AI-crafted news summaries but also assist users in managing a host of tasks through AI.

While the initial buzz narrowed down its launch to October 2024 with an anticipated $10 monthly subscription, Amazon hasn’t quite followed through. Various reports have hinted that Amazon might have pushed the launch further, possibly extended to this year, but the wait is stretching on for the release of this AI-powered tool.

The Financial Times reports that Amazon is facing “several technical hurdles,” not least of which are hallucinations—errors that are, at present, hindering the broad release of the updated Alexa.

This echoes the early days of Bing Chat Copilot and ChatGPT when both Microsoft and OpenAI found themselves under scrutiny due to their AI tools producing incorrect or misleading responses. At the time, Microsoft had to take significant steps, such as imposing character limits, to curb these inaccuracies.

In a conversation with The Financial Times, Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s AGI lead, stressed the importance of minimizing these hallucinations to nearly zero. He attributed the delay in launching to the high usage of the sophisticated tool throughout the day, which, in turn, increases its likelihood of generating false information.

Prasad acknowledges that AI hallucination is a critical concern that affects the industry’s progress. However, he assures that Amazon is diligently working to fix this problem. Alongside tackling hallucination issues, the company is also looking to ramp up Alexa’s response speed to ensure a seamless user experience.

The task, Prasad points out, is a monumental one:

“Sometimes we underestimate just how many services are built into Alexa, and it’s quite a substantial number. These apps receive billions of weekly requests, so executing reliable actions at speed… it requires doing so in a very cost-effective manner.”

Meanwhile, despite the widespread adoption of Alexa-enabled smart devices in millions of homes, Amazon isn’t exactly cashing in on this market. An internal document from last year revealed that the company lost over $25 billion in its device business between 2017 and 2021, losses spanning across Echo devices and other products like Kindles, Fire TV Sticks, and video doorbells.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy toyed with the idea of introducing a paid tier for Alexa last year, but the engineers working on the project were skeptical. They weren’t convinced that this would be sufficient to salvage Amazon’s struggling device business.