Is 'Remarkable Alexa' Ready for a Prime Time Debut?
You know the situation where a football coach looks at the schedule and decides it's better to start a rookie QB against an easier team rather than throw them right to the wolves? Consider Jason Del Rey's report about yesterday's Amazon Kindle event and new devices boss, Panos Panay:
On Tuesday morning, Panos Panay didn’t look like a man under intense pressure. Or maybe he’s just good at hiding it.
Panay, the former chief product officer of Microsoft, joined Amazon last October as the head of its gadgets and services division, including Alexa. As a result, his most pressing task since Day 1 has been to help lead a reinvention of the 10-year-old voice assistant for the new Gen AI age.
One year later, though, and neither Panay nor any other Amazon executive has yet revealed the new Alexa to the public. Fortune previously reported that the new Alexa initiative, first announced by Panay’s predecessor Dave Limp last September, has been beset by both internal structural and technological hurdles. Multiple news reports have suggested that Amazon would finally unveil it this fall.
The obvious question is if the Alexa event/products are further delayed, or if Amazon really was just squeezing in this "cupcake" of an event before facing the nation's toughest defense in the form of a tech press that is foaming at the mouth to eat Amazon alive if they fail to deliver a truly Remarkable Alexa. After all, this was the company that while not exactly the first-mover in the AI assistant space – "Hey Siri, who was the first assistant?" "Calling your first dental hygienist..." – was the one that became synonymous and ubiquitous. This, of course, is part of the problem here. Because Amazon had so much success putting Alexa anywhere and everywhere, she's a bit of an albatross around Amazon's neck as they try to evolve the product into our era of generative AI.
As I wrote in a post this past June entitled "Being Too Early Is Worse Than Being Late":
At the highest level, they all seem to stem from the very fact that Amazon had the early lead in the space. It's Innovator's Dilemma stuff, but it's more complicated and nuanced than that as well because it would seem to be a battle on at least three fronts – two of which are internal to Amazon: the newfangled chatbots, the legacy Alexa, and the AWS AI needs.
Leading up to Apple's unveil at WWDC, there was a lot of chatter that Apple was "late" to AI. But Amazon's (and Apple's to a lesser extent) situation here points to a reality where being early – and more importantly, having early success – is far worse than being late. Because they're not just racing against competition on the outside, they're fighting it on multiple fronts on the inside.
Again, sounds like fairly classic Innovator's Dilemma, but here, they're not really protecting a legacy business. Because they're not really protecting any business at all. At best, they're protecting a mindshare and distribution advantage. But at least from the outside, it's not entirely clear how much either is worth protecting.
Everyone knows what needs to be done. So that should be an easy kill and move on situation. But again, it's not. Because of a half billion devices out there in the wild. And the priorities of a cloud org which brings in all the money. And a desire to want to also race to create AGI versus just making useful products.
The notion of customer delight, long the central driving focus of Amazon, seems to now be the fourth highest priority, at best.
We're now over a year removed from the last Alexa event where Amazon talked about the generative AI future of the service. Since then, Amazon has pushed out a slew of AI offerings, but the only one seemingly related to Alexa was... rough. And I don't mean "ruff" like Rufus might say – yet another AI product offering that's not Alexa. Amazon's AI story is sort of a mess right now and they need Alexa to unify it. But again, easier said than done, clearly!
Back to Kindle, the true OG Amazon hardware which has been under-loved in recent years, Panay clearly wanted to inject some romance back into the product – as he sort of awkwardly kept using the word "romantic" several times in discussing the product. Back to Del Rey:
Whether or not some of Panay’s emotion was more performance-driven than organic, it was refreshing both because it was not typically Amazonian — and maybe that’s the point for a division that could use reinvigorating — and because it occurred at a press event in which the current industry infatuation with Gen AI was largely absent.
In fact, the only AI references arose when Panay discussed the new Kindle Scribe, which sports artificial intelligence that works in the background to summarize a user’s notes, and to make one’s writing more legible or neater if they so choose. Panay later told Fortune that he and his teams whittled down a list of more than 50 AI-powered feature ideas to this final pair.
“The point of Gen AI is not to have Gen AI,” he said in a short interview after his presentation. “The point is to make it useful.”
On that last point, agreed. And the AI elements of the Kindle – Scribe-only, for now – seem almost Apple-like in their simple, obvious utility. But we remain early enough in the AI era and the general space remains chaotic enough, that perhaps that's enough. For Kindle. For now.
But for Alexa... in our post-ChatGPT world, and in particular with all of the AI chatbots now evolving into voice, the stakes are much higher. Seemingly, Amazon is aiming not just to have Alexa give better answers, but to have her push forward fully into the "agentic" era, where she can actually do things on your behalf. And not just re-order toilet paper. If Amazon really wants to charge for Alexa, to turn her into a true business, we're going to need real utility. As I wrote back in June:
And yet, my guess would be that Amazon attempts to roll out a dozen or more new devices powered by 'Remarkable Alexa'/'Alexa Plus'. They'll be cheap, but perhaps not as cheap as previous Echo devices because of new hardware requirements for the LLMs. They'll note that the competition – meaning Apple and Google – are focused on their phones, but Amazon has always thought about this differently (having long since trying and failing to deliver their own phone).
But now, cheap(er) and everywhere will lose to the competition if the models aren't at least as good as what ChatGPT has to offer. And again, there is little indication that will be the case, and a lot of indication that will not be the case. Beyond the pure horsepower equations, it's a matter of the baggage which Alexa carries. The API hooks. The third-party integrations. The very way you talk to her. It's all going to hold her back, versus if you killed her off and resurrected her.
In that case, she'd being arriving later to the party than the others, but in better shape than when she was too early.
Anthropic may very well be the missing link here, perhaps quite literally. Can Claude help whip Alexa into money-making shape?
When asked by Del Rey if a new Alexa – again, Amazon has not been shy in noting that a new version is coming, as they announced it over a year ago! – might aim to connect with users on a more emotional level, just as Panay seemed to be attempting to do on stage at this event, he responded:
“I mean, you’re definitely going to hear me talk about emotion,” Panay told Fortune exclusively about the forthcoming Alexa release. “And connection. People have an interesting relationship with Alexa. There’s hundreds of millions of people that do right now. So you have to get it right.”
“The products coming,” he added, “are pretty awesome.”
That perhaps implies an approach similar to the one Microsoft has started taking with the new Copilot – well, the consumer-facing version anyway, their AI branding has also become a mess, which is very Microsoft – which is similar to what Inflection, the company Microsoft acquired hackquired to bring Mustafa Suleyman and team over, was building with their 'Pi' chatbot. But Amazon has a major advantage there in that their Echo devices are already in tens of millions of homes (of course there's a question if the new 'Remarkable Alexa' will be able to fully run on all those devices).
Regardless, Panay's comments set the stage for that "big event" as it were. Again, the question is if it's still going to happen this year as we're now past the halfway point of October, with a US Presidential election in two weeks. Do we get another October event right before that? Or a November event right after? Will that be enough time to get products out the door and ready to buy for the holidays? That must be the goal still, right?
Black Friday falls on November 29. That afternoon, Amazon Prime Video will be streaming the Las Vegas Raiders at the Kansas City Chiefs. As the defending champs are now the biggest television draw in the league – sorry, sad Cowboys – that's no cupcake of a game for Amazon to handle. Hopefully people have Alexa devices to buy alongside their new Kindles while they watch?