From the middle of this year, there have been a steady stream of reports about Amazon being all set to unveil an advanced AI-backed version of its voice assistant.

However, that project seems to have faced significant delays, and Alexa AI teams have recently been told that their target deadline has been moved to 2025, according to Bloomberg.

The reasons for the delay aren’t clear, though some employees have Alexa’s development delays on bureaucracy and management bloat – something that CEO Andy Jassy has been attempting to reign in.

In January, a report from Business Insider said the efforts were floundering due to tech issues, besides internal politics. Beta testers complained the service frequently provided inaccurate information and “often gives unnecessarily long or inaccurate responses”.

Internal testers found that the AI version of Alexa they are developing is nowhere as good as ChatGPT which is pushing forward in developing cutting-edge generative AI technology.

While Amazon has been developing its LLMs, Alexa teams have reportedly been relying on models from France’s Mistral AI and San Francisco-based startup Anthropic, in which Amazon has invested A$6.06 billion. Anthropic’s chatbot Claude competes with OpenAI and ChatGPT.

 

Jassy though may be shifting the goalpost with Alexa and instead of being merely “smarter” than ChatGPT, Amazon may rather be focusing on making it more intuitive. During an earnings call on Thursday, Jassy used the term: “Agentic”. That refers to a potential version of Alexa that could do things for you, without you needing to ask.

Amazon has been losing billions – A$37.99 billion by some estimates between 2017 and 2021 alone – selling its devices such as the Amazon Echo.

The company has already sold more than 500 million Alexa devices as of 2023, which means that it has a ready consumer base of several hundred million customers who could begin using its new AI-version of Alexa once it is released.

There is also the issue of how Amazon will absorb the cost of developing a more intuitive AI-backed version of Alexa. Some reports have estimated the cost of using generative AI in Alexa at 3 cents per query. As a result, when Amazon does unveil its new AI version of Alexa, it may offer it as a paid subscription model with a price points that could be anywhere between A$7-A$30, according to varying estimates.