The rise of AI
So we find ourselves leaving what could be called the ‘Summer of Artificial Intelligence’ as a confirmed and bona fide mainstream technology. Now, companies like Apple and Google proposing their AI models, while companies specifically focused on AI, like OpenAI or Perplexity, are growing and becoming more intertwined with other systems.
Problems of Amazon with Alexa
However, one major player in AI is struggling to keep up: Amazon Alexa. This week, a new paid report from Bloomberg states that Amazon is still trying to develop an ‘AI brain’ for Alexa. If you’ve been keeping track of Amazon’s progressively more frantic efforts to enhance Alexa, Bloomberg’s disclosures do not shock you.
In early June, Fortune also ran an analysis of Bezos’ bold proclamation pointing to the fact that the e-commerce giant is not even close to developing Alexa 2.0. At the same time Google unveiled massive enhancements to Gemini its AI helper and Apple was gearing up for Siri 2.0. GPT-4o was released into the world by OpenAI and Apple Intelligence only a few days ago.
Competitors get ahead
Since then AI only expanded as a concept and underwent further development. ChatGPT Search has been recently released by OpenAI to challenge Google Search, while new Artificial Intelligence elements within Apple products have begun to be released, including ChatGPT within Siri. On the same note, Google is likely to release Gemini 2.0 in December, at the latest.
Bloomberg report said that Alexa was based on a rule-based system that provided form responses, this is not the conversational AI that Amazon appears to want in the long run. However, these answers prevented Alexa from responding to any questions that did not have canned answers or from finding scores for matches that have just finished.
An uncertain future for Alexa
Eventually, all these attempts to improve Alexa as a chatbot have made the voice assistant less capable of handling smart home requests. It was predicted that Amazon would have something to ship in 2024, but that deadline was pushed back to October 2024 and then to a vague point in the future in 2025.