Amazon Reportedly Struggling to Build AI Capabilities to Make Alexa Smarter Amazon introduced its voice-first virtual assistant Alexa to the world in November 2014. The technology's name is said to be inspired by Star Trek's computer system onboard the Starship Empire and underscored CEO Jeff Bezos' ambition of creating a conversational and intelligent assistant. However, a report claims that despite a tech demo last year showing a contextually aware Alexa, it is nowhere close to being integrated with artificial intelligence (AI) to be smarter. A former Amazon employee who was working on Alexa AI has also highlighted knowledge silos and fragmented organisation structures being detrimental to Alexa's advancement.

Former Amazon employee highlights issues with improving Alexa

In a long post on X (formerly known as Twitter), Mihail Eric, who worked as Amazon's Senior Machine Learning Scientist at Alexa AI between 2019 and 2021, shared his experience of working in the company and the challenges he faced. He also explained why Alexa was a project doomed for failure.Highlighting the “bad technical process” in the company, Eric said the company had a very fragmented organisational structure, which meant getting data to conduct training for large language models (LLM). “It would take weeks to get access to any internal data for analysis or experiments. Data was poorly annotated. Documentation was either nonexistent or stale,” he added.