OpenAI made a revolutionary change in the tech realm by introducing ChatGPT in 2023. The hidden party became helpless during ChatGPT's confrontation because OpenAI took the lead in instant chat models from Alexa which Amazon maintained as its winning horse since 2011.
The essence of Alexa lies in its role as a personal assistant which can reply to queries while providing selection control for smart home functions such as temperature adjustment and shopping list management and light question answers regarding weather and sports and television show content. One single instance brought ChatGPT a variety of new capabilities which enabled it to exceed the role of a typical smart assistant. The falling popularity of Alexa personal assistants caused Amazon to search for a solution to recover from this decline.
Several users now refer to it as "Alexa AI" or "Alexa GPT" while this development needs significant advancements for the model to replicate "Chat GPT" and similar artificial intelligence systems. Early 2024 served as the initial planned launch date for the company but technical difficulties delayed the release beyond 2025. So what happened?
The birth of the idea of "Alexa"
In 2011 Jeff Bezos as Amazon CEO sent his team an email requesting a $20 vocal device that needed cloud-based Amazon processing rather than local processing while Apple launched its Siri personal assistant.
Amazon aimed to establish Alexa as an alternative to Siri. When Amazon initially released Alexa it could respond to requests through voice activation but it required multiple products to function along with the need to identify the Echo device owner's voice. This made the engineering process difficult at the start of its development.
In 2014 Amazon released its Echo device as their very first product to utilize the new assistant functionality. In remarkable speed the device reached remarkable sales achievements that surpassed one million units sold thus leading Bezos to boost spending on the personal assistant section until many employees across Amazon departments had the opportunity to move to it. The department hired more than a thousand workers during 2016.
When Bezos showed Alexa as an AI personal assistant during his investor presentations in 2011 artificial intelligence failed to operate personal assistant functionalities. The operation of Alexa functions similarly to AI apps thus creating confusion about how this happens.
A mechanism that requires great efforts.
The fundamental feature of Alexa functions as a model which receives training through various pieces of information spanning the entire scope of its competence from managing home temperatures to tracking sports scores and maintaining shopping lists and maintaining connectivity with household devices.
Alexa Minds represents the technical term which development staff uses for each individual specialized database which constitutes its database structure. Large teams develop personal assistants and anticipate questions-answers to assist the assistant with direct information sourcing or providing answers.
Although this mechanism appears on the surface to be similar to what artificial intelligence does, it is completely different in essence, as artificial intelligence such as “Chat GPT” is able to access information even if it is not trained to do so, in addition to its ability to follow a fixed pattern and logic during a single conversation and generate large texts, even if they are poems, in a different way each time you ask it a question, without entering the answers into its databases as is the case with “Alexa.”
Artificial intelligence models have superior capability to find Internet information outside their stored databases whereas Alexa operates using static information repositories exclusively. If the database contains no suitable responses to a query then Alexa becomes limited to non-response.
The method proved sufficient during previous years when advanced AI models were not developed yet but now it remains inferior to contemporary artificial intelligence models such as ChatGPT thus requiring better competing AI solutions.
Develop an internal model or rely on an external model?
Amazon wanted to create its own Language Model based on LLM technology at the same time as other AI companies to use its vast Alexa question-answer database from past years.
The development department invested great effort into this project although the results turned out unsatisfactory even though initial indicators showed promise according to "Bloomberg" reporting by CEO Andy Jassy.
Researchers who worked on Alexa's development noted that its artificial intelligence produced excessive hallucinations along with numerous wrong inquiries and false data as well as initial deceptive and fabricated information.
Jesse chose to move the consumer model launch from 2024 to 2025 while his system continues to prove challenging when using Alexa's worldwide knowledge stores.
The challenge was resolved by using open source AI models as the solution. Meta's LLAMA model failed to deliver satisfactory results when the company employed it. Recent newspaper reports indicate Amazon chose to rather work with Anthropic because Anthropic developed the Cloud model which the company now uses for Alexa. Amazon made an investment that exceeded $4 billion when it backed Anthropic.
Alexa's Importance to the E-Commerce Giant
Amazon reported first quarter profits above $143 billion in 2023 while its online store contributed $54.7 billion which constituted 38% of total profits as stated by Amazon and Statista.
The external services that the company sells to third parties took the second position followed by AWS hosting services and advertising subscriptions and online stores before other services. The Alexa-enabled device segment will locate under the other devices category.
The product line of Amazon now comprises 18 Alexa-enabled items which include spectacles, speakers, smart home devices and surveillance equipment along with smart televisions and mobile phones. Amazon projects the sales of Alexa devices to exceed 100 million units while all American homes now have at least one device running Alexa.
Amazon dedicates substantial efforts to leverage these devices for promoting its online store together with its products while simultaneously investing in "Prime" and "Prime TV" and various other company services.
The investment made by Amazon in Alexa could be at risk because the company struggles to maintain user interest toward its voice platform especially considering the new voice chat capabilities with Siri AI and voice access to ChatGPT.
Amazon requires significant advancement to transform "Alexa" into a powerful artificial intelligence model that matches existing competitors because failure to do so would force the company to forfeit its long-term work, thus making its alliance with "Anthropic" essential.
