Amazon Reportedly Delaying Updated Alexa Over Incorrect Answers

Amazon is reportedly pushing back the release of its updated Alexa, part of a string of delays for the virtual assistant.

While the company still plans to publicly unveil the new version of Alexa on Feb. 26, a report Friday (Feb. 14) by the Washington Post says the public release of the product has been moved back at least a month.

The report cited an internal memo seen by the Post and an interview with an unnamed Amazon employee, who said that the delay is due in part the new version of the assistant giving incorrect answers to test questions.

That employee says that this “smarter and more conversational” version of Alexa will not be available until at least March 31. That’s around 18 months after Amazon announced it was rolling out an artificial intelligence-powered Alexa in response to the rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

An Amazon spokesperson told PYMNTS that the company “was not going to get into future roadmap details, but we look forward to sharing the latest from the Amazon Alexa team on the 26th.”

The Post report noted that Amazon’s struggles to roll out an upgraded Alexa illustrates the struggle companies are having to enhance their products with artificial intelligence (AI), even as they invest billions of dollars in the technology.

For example, Apple last month pulled an AI feature from its iPhone that offered summaries of news stories following complaints that those summaries were inaccurate. And this weekend brought reports that Apple, like Amazon, was struggling to launch a new AI-powered version of its AI assistant Siri.

And although costs to run generative AI (GenAI) have been declining, it can still be costly to run at scale, PYMNTS wrote last month following earlier reports of Amazon’s struggles to revamp Alexa. Pretraining the foundation models can be expensive, but inference — when the AI model applies its training on new data —  isn’t cheap either.

Amazon considered charging a subscription for a large language model-powered Alexa or taking a cut of eCommerce sales, a former employee told the Financial Times last month.

However, that report added, technical roadblocks are what’s hindering the company’s progress. Crafting a smarter Alexa isn’t as easy as adding a large language model to it to replace its simpler algorithms.

“It’s not as simple as moving from one model to another,” Mike Finley, CTO and co-founder of AnswerRocket, told PYMNTS. “Agentic AI is a bit more nuanced. It needs more structure and guidance to get us a better result. We will have to give it the original ‘prompt’ like we would in the past, but there’s more work to shape the AI behavior we want.”