Amazon delays the revamped AI assistant again, faces technical glitches

E-commerce giant Amazon is reportedly facing challenges with its upgraded AI assistant due to technical glitches that are causing delays in releasing it to the public.

This comes as tech firms are investing huge amounts of money into generative AI, upgrading their virtual assistants in line with industry trends as well as beating the competition in this highly competitive AI industry.

Amazon to delay new Alexa release again due to incorrect answers

The e-commerce giant first announced its revamped virtual assistant – Alexa in September 2023 but delayed releasing it to the public.

Now, the second launch had been scheduled for February 26, but internal messages seen by The Washington Post suggest that the public release has been pushed back until more than a month later. An Amazon employee who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their job also confirmed this to the publication.

Employees at Amazon recently learned of the delays, which they said was partly because the revamped tool was giving wrong answers to test questions. The more conversational version will not be available until March 31 or later, according to the employee, representing a delay of at least a year and a half from the initial announcement.

Amazon’s initiative was in response to growing competition from OpenAI’s ChatGPT which was launched in November 2022 to immediate success. During a recent earnings call, Amazon executives revealed that the company would spend $100 billion mainly on developing data centers this year, as the company seeks to enhance its AI services.

An improved Alexa could help the firm boost its earnings by driving more sales of Alexa devices once the upgrade is made publicly available. According to MSN, Alexa is free on more than 500 million devices around the world that can play music, dim lights and read headlines.

Features on the subscribers-only Alexa could include the ability to adopt personality, recall conversations, order takeout, or call a taxi. According to The Post, some of the new features are similar to Alexa capabilities that were previously available for free through partnerships with companies like Grubhub and Uber.

Being a popular product and a decade old, the Alexa brand is valuable, and the company is hesitant to risk customer trust by launching a product that is not reliable.

Elsewhere, other virtual assistants are experiencing glitches too

The Alexa challenges are not unique to Amazon. Its failure to launch the new virtual assistant reflects how even after investing billions of dollars into AI, tech firms still struggle to push marketable products with the technology.

This also comes as investors on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley have expressed concerns, warning the sector that it may struggle to achieve profits at the scale needed to repay the huge investments in generative AI technology.

Last month, Apple paused an AI feature for iPhones that summarized news notifications after misrepresenting alerts. Now, Cryptopolitan has reported that Apple’s long-promised revamp of Siri is facing engineering problems and software bugs, which may force the iPhone maker to postpone or limit its release, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Apple first announced plans for a new AI-powered Siri at its developers conference in June last year. The company even advertised some of the latest features to customers. However, Apple is now in a race to finish the software, with some features originally planned for April. These may be pushed back to May or later.

According to the report, getting Siri right, which was first introduced as a digital assistant in 2011, is essential for Apple, which is falling behind its competitors.

Its makeover therefore becomes a centerpiece of the Apple Intelligence platform, which is the iPhone maker’s effort to catch up in AI and drive iPhone upgrades. Before the Siri challenges, Apple Intelligence experienced a bumpy rollout and the software has been released in stages since its October launch with features like news summaries drawing criticism for glitches.

As for Alexa, it has struggled with accuracy since 2023. When asked if there was fraud in the 2020 presidential election, Alexa wrongfully said there was a “massive amount,” echoing misinformation allegedly propagated by Trump that the election was stolen.

According to The Post, Alexa also gave an incorrect response last year when asked who the US president was. Amazon has revealed that it looks out for bad responses via user feedback and continued testing of the tool.

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