If you’re wondering what happened to the new and improved version of Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, you’re not alone. The new Alexa is still stuck in development, with Amazon reportedly cutting off access to its beta stages, including the new “Let’s Chat” stage. As a result, the launch scheduled for late 2024 has been postponed to next year.
The problem seems to be with the Large-Scale Language Model (LLM). While the new Alexa was designed with user requests in mind, it is likely to fail at some of the most basic functions that were easy to perform in previous versions, such as creating timers and controlling smart lights. According to a follow-up report. .
Amazon originally planned to announce a new version of Alexa AI in October, but that plan has been pushed back to next year. (As you may have noticed, October is over.) The original timeline was to premiere the next evolutionary step in Alexa’s evolution on October 17th, but Amazon changed course. We decided to use that date to unveil our new line of Kindle e-readers. Then, in August, news surfaced that a new Alexa feature would be installed and that a monthly fee would be charged.
When ChatGPT started gaining popularity in the summer of 2023, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wanted to see if Alexa could compete if the AI ​​was upgraded. Jassy reportedly began asking Alexa sports questions “like an ESPN reporter at a playoff press conference,” but the answers were “far from perfect.” It also became Jassy’s latest game score.
Nevertheless, Alexa has passed enough stages that Jassy and his fellow executives felt engineers could build a beta version by early 2024. Unfortunately, Amazon was unable to meet the deadline.
Even with the new deadline, there’s still a long way to go to resolve the issues with the new Alexa. Some employees said bloomberg Beyond Alexa’s internal structure, the problem lies in Amazon’s excessive control and lack of a “compelling vision for AI-powered Alexa.” .
