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Amazon ‘dropped the ball’ with Alexa, former employee says

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5 months ago

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Amazon ‘dropped the ball’ with Alexa, former employee says

  • A former Amazon employee criticized the company’s handling of its Alexa voice assistant.
  • Mihail Eric said on X that technical and bureaucratic issues hindered Alexa’s development.
  • He said Amazon had the resources to become the “unequivocal” leader in conversational AI, but failed. 

A former employee said Amazon “dropped the ball” with its voice assistant Alexa.

Mihail Eric, a former senior machine learning scientist at Alexa AI, wrote in a lengthy X post about how he felt Amazon missed its opportunity to turn Alexa into a leading product as competitors make headway with their own AI-infused voice assistants.

“We had all the resources, talent, and momentum to become the unequivocal market leader in conversational AI,” Eric wrote on Tuesday.

He added: “But most of that tech never saw the light of day and never received any noteworthy press. Why? The reality is Alexa AI was riddled with technical and bureaucratic problems.”

Eric, who left Amazon in 2021 according to his LinkedIn profile, said Amazon might have fumbled its chance to dominate the conversational AI space due to a “bad technical process,” “fragmented org,” and “product-science misalignment.”

In his view, Amazon’s infrastructure was “agonizingly painful” for its developers because of guardrails put in place to protect user data. He added that computing resources to carry out experiments were limited.

Eric also claimed that progress on Alexa was hindered by a organizational structure that resulted in overlaps between teams that sometimes worked on similar challenges.

“This introduced an almost Darwinian flavor to org dynamics where teams scrambled to get their work done to avoid getting reorged and subsumed into a competing team,” he wrote.

According to Eric, the Alexa team had to “constantly justify” its existence to senior leaders, and there was a conflict between the product and science teams in weekly meetings. He said this led to a churn of managers every few months and the sunsetting of its efforts to make Alexa a multimodal agent in Amazon customers’ homes.

Eric also said that after OpenAI unveiled its multimodal GPT-4o model, which has a voice assistant called Sky, he received a message from a former Alexa colleague, who he says told him: “You’d think voice assistants would have been our forte at Alexa.”

Amazon and Eric didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.

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