Amazon’s AI-enhanced Alexa reportedly delayed again

With an Alexa-themed event scheduled for February 26, it seemed like the long wait for the generative AI-powered Echo upgrade trailed all the way back in September 2023 might finally be over.

But it appears Echo owners eager to see Alexa’s major upgrade will have to wait a bit longer, as The Washington Post reports the actual rollout to users has been pushed back again.

According to internal messages seen by the newspaper, employees have been told that the “smarter and more conversational” version of Alexa, originally scheduled for this month, has been pushed back to the end of March.

An internal source within Amazon echoed this, adding the potential for it to slip further. The Washington Post claims the source said it won’t be available until “March 31 or later”. As the paper notes, that will be a full 18 months after it was originally unveiled as a response to OpenAI and the rise of ChatGPT.

Protecting “customer trust”

The reason behind this is all too predictable to those who have been on the sharp end of generative AI’s frequent hallucinations. It’s “due in part to the new version of the assistant giving incorrect answers to test questions, at a recent meeting, the employee said.”

This isn’t something unique to Amazon. Famously, Google’s parent company Alphabet managed to lose over $100 billion of market value after Bard — its original AI chatbot — made an incorrect statement about the James Webb telescope during a live event in 2023.

Coincidentally, $100 billion is also the figure that Amazon has revealed it will spend on AI technology this year — “much of it on data center development”.

So it must be frustrating for shareholders that something that could offer a return on investment — the new version of Alexa is expected to be a paid upgrade — has failed to materialize a year and a half after first being trailed.

According to the Washington Post’s source, the cautious approach is all down to customer trust. “As a popular product that is 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,” the report explains.

Though Alexa has always had some strange answers in the mix, the caution seems sensible. While Google’s introduction of AI in search results has already caused plenty of problems, at least it’s easy to fact-check, with sources clearly labeled to give an insight into its thought process. With Alexa on an Amazon Echo, it’s not clear how you’d get a look inside that black box, which means accuracy is even more important — especially when you consider that children may be asking questions unsupervised too.

Nonetheless, it means that while the upcoming February 26 event will give us a look at the future, it’s a future that’s still at least a month away — and possibly more.