When Amazon first introduced Alexa in 2014 with its Amazon Echo, it changed the entire narrative of smart speakers. 

And how could it not?

We were attempting to wrap our heads around this stand-alone voice assistant that could communicate back-and-forth with us, while adding a touch of jazz and personality to its highly intelligent knowledge base of facts that it would spit back to us on demand. 

While early versions of voice assistants had been around for a few years, including Apple’s Siri (2011), nothing was quite like Alexa, as nearly 100 million Alexa-enabled devices had been sold by 2018. 

Unfortunately, Alexa never really quite “took off,” failing to capture the mainstream adoption that Amazon had hoped for. 

Last year, INSIDER labeled the Alexa business model a “colossal failure,” with INSIDER reporting that the division that houses Amazon’s Alexa is on track to lose $10 billion USD in 2022 alone.

The intended customer experience that Amazon had initially hoped to deliver to consumers was diminished by a number of factors, including overly exhaustive responses to simple questions and an overall lack of personality to a clear lacking of an OS platform like iOS or Android that it could essentially run all of its services off of. 

The “glorified clock radio,” while still available on the market, has been headed in the wrong direction – until now, at least according to insight recently provided by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in reference to the uproar and popularity of ChatGPT. 

“I think it’s exciting, what’s possible with generative AI,” Jassy told the Financial Times. “And it’s part of what you’re seeing with models like ChatGPT. But most large, deeply technical companies like ours, have been working on these very large, generative AI models themselves for a long time.”

According to Jassy, Amazon has reportedly been working on similar technology for quite some time, leveraging its A.I. and machine learning technology in its Alexa voice assistant and its code recommendation generator, CodeWhisperer. 

However, supporters of Amazon have expressed concern that the tech giant is significantly falling behind in the generative A.I. department. 

If you’re new to the generative A.I. conversation, these are merely algorithms that have been trained to produce text, images, code, audio, and/or video. 

Conversations centered around A.I. generated art has been hot and heavy in the Web3 space, specifically as it pertains to growing legal concerns about alleged metadata theft. 

Jassy also told the FT that Amazon is also pursuing opportunities to partner with smaller firms to further build out its generative A.I. department, but didn’t provide much information beyond that. 

Stability AI, a competitor to Microsoft-backed OpenAI, recently stated that Amazon is its “preferred cloud partner” that it would like to begin training and building its AI models on. 

While Amazon shares the excitement in the rise of ChatGPT, it also believes that there is still a major gap between that and its Alexa, where ChatGPT still lacks the personality, memory, and knowledge of current events that Alexa is able to regurgitate immediately. 

“If you were to ask Alexa details about the World Cup, who scored what goal in what match, Alexa would know,” he said, adding that as of now, ChatGPT doesn’t,” said David Limp, senior vice president for devices and services at Amazon.

He continued by saying that “[r]eal-time knowledge is equally as important as the ability to write a screenplay, which GPT does pretty well. Alexa is pretty personalized today. It remembers things like your favorite music.”

With Amazon aware that its relevance in the market is on the line with competitors actively jumping onto the generative A.I. train, we are either preparing ourselves for a more interactive, chatty Alexa – or what many have thought to be a doomed experiment that never had the strength to stand on its own legs. 

In other news, read about Google’s newly announced ChatGPT competitor, Bard.