by Dan Moren

October 30, 2024 7:02 AM PT

Why Alexa hasn’t yet become the real computer of the future

Great piece by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy at The Verge about the evolution of the Amazon Echo and how an exciting project turns into a boring one:

Alexa is still mainly doing what it’s always done: playing music, reporting the weather, and setting timers. Its capabilities have expanded — Alexa can now do useful things like control your lights, call your mom, and remind you to take out the trash. But despite a significant investment of time, money, and resources over the last decade, the voice assistant hasn’t become noticeably more intelligent. As one former Amazon employee said, “We worried we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer.”

I’ve had some sort of smart speaker in my house since the first Echo, which I reviewed back in 2015, and I agree wholeheartedly with Tuohy’s assessment. There was a real feeling of breakthrough to that original product, but—not unlike Siri—it feels like it never really moved a base level of functionality, despite all of Amazon’s efforts.

I think a big part of what has stymied Amazon in particular is trying to figure out where the Echo fit into its overall strategy. If Apple’s business is selling hardware and Google’s is selling ads, Amazon’s biggest might be shopping? But the shopping experience from the Echo has always been weird and less than ideal. ¹

Some of these problems might get resolved by the introduction of large language models that make voice assistants like Alexa and Siri more responsive, but again, as Tuohy points out, the real challenge is acting on our requests—to which I’d argue, the real underlying subtext is that whether we can get to a point where we can trust the voice assistants to do what we’re asking them. If you can’t—if the worry is that you will ask it to water your plants and come home to find your house flooded—then this whole technology is nothing more than an evolutionary cul de sac.