Late last year, the Amazon division working on Alexa was a major target of the company's 18,000 layoffs, and a number of top Alexa executives have left the company. "We never had that App Store moment for the assistants," said Carolina Milanesi, a consumer technology analyst for the research firm Creative Strategies who was a consultant for Amazon.
While Amazon offered a "skills" store to make Alexa control third-party accessories like light switches, it was difficult for people to find and set up skills for the speakers - unlike the friction-free experience of downloading mobile apps from app stores. The company also underinvested in creating an ecosystem for people to easily expand Alexa's abilities, in the way that Apple had done with its App Store, which helped stoke interest in the iPhone, the person said. But while people had fun playing with Alexa's ability to answer weather prompts and set alarms, few asked Alexa to order items, he added.Īmazon may have overinvested in making new kinds of hardware, like now-discontinued alarm clocks and microwaves that worked with Alexa, which sold at or below cost, the former executive said. (In contrast, Apple successfully used Siri to entice buyers to its iPhones.)Īfter Amazon released the Echo, a smart speaker powered by Alexa, in 2014, the company hoped the product would help it increase sales in its online store by enabling consumers to talk to Alexa to place orders, said a former Amazon leader involved with Alexa. That meant there was no path for Siri to become a creative assistant like ChatGPT, he said.Īlexa and Google Assistant relied on technology similar to Siri's, but the companies struggled to generate meaningful revenue with the assistants, former managers at Amazon and Google said. Adding more complex features like new search tools could take nearly a year. So seemingly simple updates, like adding some new phrases to the data set, would require rebuilding the entire database, which could take up to six weeks, Burkey said. If someone wanted to add a word to Siri's database, he added, "it goes in one big pile." That made it "one big snowball," he said. Siri's database contains a gigantic list of words, including the names of musical artists and locations like restaurants, in nearly two dozen languages. Siri also had a cumbersome design that made it time-consuming to add new features, said Burkey, who was given the job of improving Siri in 2014. These can understand a finite list of questions and requests like "What's the weather in New York City?" or "Turn on the bedroom lights." If a user asks the virtual assistant to do something that is not in its code, the bot simply says it can't help. In contrast, Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant are essentially what are known as command-and-control systems. They can then suggest words to complete a sentence. Chatbots are powered by what are known as large language models, which are systems trained to recognize and generate text based on enormous data sets scraped off the web. The assistants and the chatbots are based on different flavors of AI. Amazon said that it saw a 30% increase in customer engagement globally with Alexa in the last year and that it was optimistic about its mission to build world-class AI. Google said it was committed to providing a great virtual assistant to help people on their phones and inside their homes and cars the company is separately testing a chatbot called Bard. Microsoft has worked closely with OpenAI, investing $13 billion in the startup and incorporating its technology into the Bing search engine, as well as other products.Īpple declined to comment on Siri. Voice assistants are "dumb as a rock," Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive, said in an interview this month with The Financial Times, declaring that newer AI would lead the way. When those experiments failed, enthusiasm for the technology waned at the companies, they said. Amazon and Google miscalculated how the voice assistants would be used, leading them to invest in areas with the technology that rarely paid off, former employees said.
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Siri ran into technological hurdles, including clunky code that took weeks to update with basic features, said John Burkey, a former Apple engineer who worked on the assistant. Over the past decade, the products hit roadblocks.
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