It’s been more than a decade since Jeff Bezos enthusiastically sketched out his vision for Alexa on a whiteboard at Amazon headquarters. Its voice assistant would help with all sorts of tasks, such as shopping online, controlling gadgets, or even reading kids a bedtime story.
But the Amazon The founder’s grand vision of a new voice-controlled computing platform fell short. As the hype in the tech world feverishly turns to generative AI as the “next big thing”, the moment has many people asking tough questions about the previous “next big thing” – the very appreciated voice assistants from Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft and others.
A “grow grow grow” culture described by a former Amazon Alexa marketing director has now focused on how the device can help the e-commerce giant make money.
“If you can do something that you could directly monetize, you should do it,” was the recent dictate from Amazon executives, according to a current Alexa team employee.
Under the new general manager Andy Jassy’s tenure the shift in focus led to significant layoffs from Amazon’s Alexa team late last year as executives examine the product’s direct contribution to business results.
The belt-tightening came as part of wider cuts that have seen the e-commerce giant cut 18,000 jobs across the group amid pressure to improve profits during a global tech downturn.
At Microsoft, whose chief executive Satya Nadella said in 2016 that “bots are the new apps,” it’s now recognized that voice assistants, including its own Cortana, haven’t lived up to the hype.
“They were all dumb as a rock,” Nadella told the Financial Times last month. “Whether it’s Cortana or Alexa or Google Assistant or Siri, all of that just doesn’t work. We had a product that was supposed to be the new front-end for a lot of [information] it did not work.
Nadella can afford to be frank: Microsoft’s recent introduction of the AI chatbot ChatGPT into its Bing search engine means the company is now seen as a leader in the field, having been mostly overlooked by the majority of internet users. .
ChatGPT’s ability to understand complex instructions left existing voice assistants looking relatively dumb, said Adam Cheyer, the co-creator of Siri, the voice assistant acquired by Apple in 2010 and introduced to the iPhone a year later. .
“Previous abilities were just too inconvenient,” he said. “Nobody knows what they can or cannot do. They don’t know what they can or cannot say.
Efforts to highlight additional features, asking Alexa to blurt out “did you know” information at sometimes inopportune times, have only frustrated users.
“Our patience is limited, you get worked up,” says Carolina Milanesi, president of market research group Creative Strategies. “That’s not the job you asked him to do. “She” was overstepping the bounds. »
For many users, Alexa is seen simply as a “glorified clock radio,” noted independent tech analyst Benedict Evans.
Amazon said it was fully committed to Alexa and “as optimistic as ever.”
“The fact is, Alexa continues to grow. Engagement grew by over 30% globally in 2022, with over 50% of Alexa customers now using it to shop,” Amazon said.
In many ways, Alexa can be considered an extraordinary success for Amazon. It is by far the leader in the United States with around 66% of the market, according to Insider Intelligence. Eight years after its soft launch in early 2014, “Alexa” calling now elicits a robotic response in the homes of about 20% of the US population, the group estimates.
Third-party manufacturers have created more than 140,000 Alexa-enabled products, and its operating system controls more than 300 million smart devices, such as light bulbs or cameras, according to Amazon. Research group IDC estimates that more than half of Alexa owners interact with the device at least once a day, a better success rate than Apple Siri and Google Assistant.
But the direct value of those interactions to Amazon seemed low, and there had been internal disagreements over how to measure or credit Alexa’s impact on Amazon.com spend, two people familiar with the matter said. Alexa strategy.
The current mood is in stark contrast to when enthusiasm for Amazon’s Alexa stemmed eagerly from Bezos, who was directly involved in guiding Alexa’s testing and development, even going so far as to personally create the app. appearance and language of marketing materials.
“Our goal was not to make the Alexa program profitable,” said the former Amazon marketing manager. “It was to sell devices – and we were selling tons of devices.”
Having missed out on the smartphone boom, Amazon’s hope was that Alexa would open up a vast new ecosystem of new and ideally lucrative voice-powered apps. Amazon named these apps “Skills” and opened up Alexa to third-party developers.
There were now more than 130,000 skills in Amazon’s store, the company announced in November. Google has taken a similar step with its Assistant, calling them “conversational actions.”
But skills on Alexa are largely offered for free, with developers saying monetization is nearly impossible, while “discovery” – the process by which users find new apps to try – is difficult.
“I think there’s still a ton of people out there who don’t even know what a ‘skill’ is,” said Brian Tarbox of Wabi Sabi Software, who develops Alexa Skills. “I don’t know if they’ve done a great job of saying, ‘Hey, here’s all these other things Alexa can do.’
Google has experienced similar challenges. In June, it will end access to third-party “conversational actions” specifically designed for its voice assistant, instead requiring them to add voice functionality to its Android smartphone and tablet apps.
Without a smartphone, Amazon didn’t have a similar pullback, said IDC analyst Adam Wright, noting that the continued competitive threat from Apple and Android “could erode gains made via smart speaker sales. “.
But a revival of voice assistants could come from generative AI, which could make them much smarter than they are today.
“It’s buzzing,” the current Amazon employee said of tools like ChatGPT. “There was a directive that came from some [executives] for teams to think about what it would look like for Alexa to be smarter.
The technology had the potential to put voice assistants back on track toward the original sci-fi goal, added Siri co-creator Cheyer.
“I think it’s a matter of quality,” he said. “Fundamentally, this technology will enable this breadth, flexibility and complexity that did not exist with the previous generation of voice assistants. I think there will be a renaissance.