Amazon’s AI leader says technical issues are holding back Alexa AI

Amazon was planning to roll out a new Alexa powered by generative AI in October 2024, but that apparently didn’t happen. According to reports issued at the time, the company He was pushed back Its new voice assistant will launch sometime this year. And now a new report from Financial Times He says the company still needs to be able to overcome “many technical hurdles” before it can launch a more powerful version of Alexa. One of the main problems he has to solve is “hallucinations,” which are incorrect or false results that generative AI systems sometimes produce.

Rohit Prasad, head of Amazon’s artificial general intelligence team, said the hallucinations should be “close to zero.” foot. Since people tend to use Alexa throughout the day, they could end up spreading a lot of misinformation if Amazon fails to address the issue. Prasad admits that hallucinations “are still an open problem in the industry,” but his team is “working hard on it.” Amazon must also work on Alexa’s response speed, or latency, because users expect to get a response quickly after they ask the assistant a question or ask it to perform a task.

Getting Alexa to that last mile was extremely difficult, the Amazon AGI leader said. “Sometimes we underestimate the number of services built into Alexa, which is a huge number,” he said. foot. His team has to ensure that the new assistant will be able to work with hundreds of third-party apps and services. The new Alexa is expected to be powered by Anthropic Claude Artificial Intelligence and the company’s in-house Amazon Nova models, which will reportedly require a subscription as a way for the company to make money. But there’s no set release date yet, and based on what a current employee told the publication, it won’t be coming anytime soon. They said Amazon still has a lot of things to do, like making sure it works “nearly 100 percent of the time,” adding child safety filters and testing different Alexa integrations.