Amazon had planned to release a new Alexa powered by generative AI in October 2024, but that apparently didn't happen. According to reports at the time, the company pushed back The new voice assistant will be released sometime this year. Now a new report from Financial Times says the company still needs to overcome “several technical hurdles” before it can launch a more powerful version of Alexa. One of the main problems it will have to solve is “hallucinations”, which are incorrect or false results that generative AIs produce from time to time.
Hallucinations should be “close to zero,” said Rohit Prasad, head of Amazon's artificial general intelligence (AGI) team. F.T.. Since people tend to use Alexa throughout the day, it could end up spewing out a lot of false information if Amazon can't fix the problem. Prasad admits that hallucinations are “still an open problem in the industry,” but his team is “working very hard on it.” Amazon also has to consider Alexa's response speed, or latency, since users expect to receive a response quickly after asking the assistant a question or asking it to perform a task.
Amazon's AGI executive said that getting Alexa to the last mile was very difficult. “Sometimes we underestimate how many services are integrated into Alexa, and it's a huge number,” he said. F.T.. His team must ensure that the new assistant can work with hundreds of third-party applications and services. The new Alexa is expected to be powered by Claude AI from Anthropic and Amazon's own Nova models, and will reportedly require a subscription for the company to make money. But it still doesn't have a firm release date, and based on what a current employee told the publication, it won't be coming anytime soon. They said Amazon still has a lot to do, such as making sure it works “nearly 100 percent of the time,” adding child safety filters and testing various Alexa integrations.