The media published information according to which Amazon decided to push back the release of its updated Alexa voice assistant.
It is worth noting that there is currently a whole series of delays for virtual assistants.
According to information published by the media, Amazon, which is an e-commerce giant and at the same time one of the largest players in the global technology sector, has not yet officially canceled the public debut of the new version of Alexa on February 26, but will soon announce that the relevant release will move back for at least a month. Journalists claim that the company has already made the mentioned decision.
The media refers to an internal memo and a conversation with an Amazon employee who used the right of anonymity and reported that the updated Alexa was giving incorrect answers to test questions. At the same time, the mentioned company employee noted that a smarter and more conversational version of the voice assistant will not be available at least until March 31. This debut is expected to take place about 18 months after Amazon announced the rolling out of Alexa powered by artificial intelligence. The company’s action was a kind of response to the growing popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The mentioned virtual product powered by artificial intelligence has demonstrated impressive abilities related to processing huge amounts of information and generating original content.
At the same time, an Amazon spokesperson, while communicating with media representatives, without going into details of the roadmap, said that the company was looking forward to sharing the latest news from the Alexa team on February 26. It is not yet known whether this statement confirms or refutes what was said by the initial media insider. At the end of the current month, the company may not present the updated voice assistant, but at the same time officially announce its upcoming debut and disclose a specific date for the relevant event. Also, in this case, Amazon may announce the characteristics of the improved Alexa. At the same time, the mentioned assumptions are nothing more than theoretical probabilities and their implementation is not guaranteed.
At the beginning of the current month, journalists published information according to which Amazon sent out invitations to a February 26 event featuring the head of its devices and services team Panos Panay. At that time, the media claimed that in this case, it meant the debut of the updated Alexa.
The difficulties Amazon has faced in updating its voice assistant are not a unique practice or an isolated case. Currently, many companies are experiencing various problems when developing new versions of their products powered by artificial intelligence. It is worth noting that the corresponding state of affairs is observed against the background of investments in billions of dollars in machine intelligence. Also in this case, there is an example of the importance of artificial intelligence as an advanced technology of modernity.
It’s worth mentioning that last month Apple pulled the AI feature from the iPhone. This feature offered summaries of news stories to users of smartphones of the mentioned company. iPhone owners complained that the mentioned information materials were inaccurate. Also last week, the media reported that Apple, like Amazon, was struggling to launch a new version of its Siri assistant powered by artificial intelligence. Technology companies are convinced that access to AI functions within the framework of the practice of using a particular device will contribute to a high level of consumer demand for this product, which will lead to sales growth. At the same time, in this case, excessive haste or incorrect functioning of artificial intelligence features is clearly not the way to achieve the mentioned goals.
Recently, there has been a tendency to reduce the amount of costs required for running generative machine intelligence. However, this does not mean that scaling artificial intelligence in the foreseeable future will not be expensive. Pretraining the foundation AI models continue to require significant financial injections. This is even more typical for inference. This implies a practice in which the artificial intelligence model applies its training on new data.
Last month, a former Amazon employee told the media that the company was considering charging a subscription for a large language model-powered Alexa or taking a cut of e-commerce sales.
The mentioned firm has significant prospects, but its progress still continues to face technical roadblocks. Crafting a smarter Alexa is not as simple as adding a large language model to it to replace its simpler algorithms.
Mike Finley, chief technical officer and co-founder of AnswerRocket, stated during a conversation with media representatives that it is not as simple as moving from one model to another. According to him, there are a few more nuances in agentic artificial intelligence. He also stated that it needs more structure and guidance to get a better result. According to him, it is necessary to give artificial intelligence the original prompt like companies would in the past, but there is more work to shape the AI behavior firms want.
It is highly likely that both technology giants and startups will strive to perform the most speed-intensive actions as part of efforts to integrate machine intelligence into their digital ecosystems. The corresponding assumption is because recently there has been increased competition in the artificial intelligence industry. This is a logical process, given that AI is actually the most advanced technology at the current stage of human civilization development. The effectiveness and accuracy of digital cognitive systems are already gradually beginning to determine the business prospects of technology companies. In the future, the mentioned impact factor, the source of which is artificial intelligence, is most likely to increase. AI is not just an additional function, but it also contains the potential to become a new means of production and, in the longer term, surpass the human mind as part of a consistent evolution.
As we have reported earlier, Amazon Presents New Slate of AI Models.
