Inside Amazon’s Agonizing Attempt to Save Alexa With AI [Video]

Amazon’s Alexa seems like the perfect product for the generative AI era.

Getting this powerful technology to actually work well with the digital assistant is a monumental challenge that’s been plagued by gnarly technical problems and repeated delays.

Customer-friction concerns, partnership hiccups, compatibility questions, latency problems, and accuracy issues have snarled progress, according to internal Amazon documents and multiple people involved in the project.

The Alexa team is under immense pressure to get something out. A decade ago it launched with Echo speakers and became a household name. But that early success fizzled and the business has so far failed to become profitable, leading to drastic cutbacks and layoffs in recent years.

Some company insiders consider this AI moment to be a seismic opportunity for Alexa, and potentially the last chance to reignite consumer interest in the voice assistant through the power of large language models.

A product of this scale is “unprecedented, and takes time,” an Amazon spokesperson …