Amazon's AI lead says technical issues are holding back Alexa AI

Amazon had been planning to roll out a new Alexa powered by generative AI in October 2024, but that obviously didn't happen. According to reports that came out back then, the company pushed back its new voice assistant's release to sometime this year. Now, a new report by The Financial Times says the company still needs to be able to overcome "several technical hurdles" before it can launch a more powerful version of Alexa. One of the main problems it has to solve is "hallucinations," which are incorrect or false results that generative AIs produce at times. 

Hallucinations have to be "close to zero," Rohit Prasad, leader of Amazon's artificial general intelligence (AGI) team told FT. Since people tend to use Alexa throughout the day, it could end up spitting out a lot of false information if Amazon fails to address the issue. Prasad admits that hallucinations are "still an open problem in the industry," but his team is "working extremely hard on it." Amazon also has to work Alexa's response speed or latency, because users expect to get a response quickly after they ask the assistant a question or after they ask it to perform a task. 

The Amazon AGI lead said that getting Alexa to that last mile has been really hard. "Sometimes we underestimate how many services are integrated into Alexa, and it’s a massive number," he told FT. His team has to ensure that the new assistant will be able to work with hundreds of third-party apps and services. The new Alexa is expected to be powered by Anthropic’s Claude AI and the company's in-house Amazon Nova models, and it will reportedly require a subscription as a way for the company to make money. But it still has no solid release date, and based on what a current employee told the publication, it's not rolling out anytime soon. Amazon still has a lot of things to do, they said, such as making sure it works "close to 100 percent of the time," adding child safety filters and testing Alexa various integrations.