Amazon is revamping its Alexa voice assistant as it prepares to launch a new paid subscription plan this year, according to internal documents and people familiar with the matter. But the change is causing internal conflict and may lead to further delay.
Tentatively named “Alexa Plus,” the paid version of Alexa is intended to offer more conversational and personalized artificial-intelligence technology, one of the documents obtained by Business Insider says. The people said the team was working toward a June 30 launch deadline and had been testing the underlying voice technology, dubbed “Remarkable Alexa,” with 15,000 external customers.
But the quality of the new Alexa’s answers is still falling short of expectations, often sharing inaccurate information, external tests have found. Amazon is now going through a major overhaul of Alexa’s technology stack to address this issue, though the team is experiencing some discord.
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The people familiar with the matter said the limited preview with 15,000 external customers discovered that, while Remarkable Alexa was generally good at being conversational and informative, it was still deflecting answers, often giving unnecessarily long or inaccurate responses. It also needed to improve its ability to answer ambiguous customer requests that require the engagement of multiple services, such as turning on the light and music at the same time.
The new Alexa still didn’t meet the quality standards expected for Alexa Plus, these people added
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Source: Amazon Is Struggling With Its Next-Gen “Remarkable Alexa’
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