Amazon has infused its famed assistant Alexa with the power of artificial intelligence — an upgrade that’s apparently come with some serious drawbacks and headaches.
As The Verge reports, the company is set to launch new hardware later this week as part of an effort to bring its new-and-improved Alexa Plus service to more customers. To test it, Verge senior reviewer Jennifer Pattison Tuohy was able to get early access to Alexa’s new ChatGPT-like smart home experience.
But things haven’t gone smoothly.
“Today, running on underpowered hardware and with what feels like a surface-level integration into my smart home, Alexa Plus often leaves me frustrated,” Pattison Tuohy wrote. “There’s power under that hood, but it feels largely inaccessible. The assistant desperately needs something to make it more compelling — and better hardware could be the answer.”
For one thing, the whole thing sounds clunky. While the reporter lauded the system for recognizing more natural language prompts — allowing her to lock doors, adjust the thermostat, or set reminders — many requests took “up to 15 seconds for a response.” Even checking the weather could take over ten seconds, an eternity compared to simply glancing at a smartphone app.
Those pain points are especially incriminating considering how many resources and billions of dollars companies like Amazon have been pouring into AI tech. The mega retailer is planning to spend over $100 billion this year on cloud computing and AI infrastructure buildouts — but given the sorry state of its flagship smart home assistant, it’s hard to say if consumers will be swayed.
Another problem is that hallucinations remain a major problem plaguing the current crop of AI-powered tools. Translating woefully incorrect information into the real world could have all sorts of unpredictable consequences in a smart home; in spite of all the high-tech features, for instance, Pattison Tuohy couldn’t get Alexa to properly control her bathroom fan.
That’s on top of pesky problems she’d already encountered earlier in the summer, when the smart assistant got confused following simple recipes and tried to “gaslight” her when she asked for clarity. It also told her that it “can’t actually make coffee,” despite being connected to a smart Bosch coffee maker.
Alexa Plus also excitedly told her she could get a two-day ticket to the Dollywood theme park for $42 a day — which was entirely incorrect (in reality, the ticket was $122 for a two-day pass.)
“LLMs aren’t designed to be predictable,” Pattison Tuohy argued, “and what you want when controlling your home is predictability.”
Back in January, Amazon AI team lead Rohit Prasad told the Financial Times that the company still had to sort out “several technical hurdles” before rolling out the already long-awaited feature.
“Hallucinations have to be close to zero,” he said at the time.
It’s an admirable idea, but it sounds like the tech just isn’t there yet.
Besides slow hardware and unpredictability, the e-commerce giant’s desire to sell you stuff has remained a top priority. Following the company’s early access rollout in May, tech journalist Casey Newton was also unimpressed with his experience with the company’s Alexa Plus-enabled Echo Show 5 device.
During an August episode of the New York Times’ “Hard Fork” podcast, Newton found that the device “constantly invites you to spend money with Amazon.” Even when he asked Alexa Plus what it was capable of, it offered him to “explore Gen Z music trends” — only to have it advertise the company’s Amazon Music subscription service.
The “Hard Fork” hosts were also dogged by issues with tech’s reliability, with Newton’s cohost Kevin Roose finding that Alexa Plus had lost the “ability to reliably set and cancel alarms” — a “core thing that I use this product for.”
“And so I said to Alexa, ‘Alexa, cancel the alarm,’” he said on the show. “Silence. Nothing. This is a command that I have issued probably 1,000 times.”
More on Alexa AI: Amazon’s New Alexa AI Sounds Like a Dystopian Nightmare
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