My Amazon Echo works well as a speaker to play music and podcasts while I’m cooking.
It also gets heavy use as a timer while I’m making dinner. Alexa, the digital assistant inside the Echo, can theoretically do more than serve as a stopwatch or countdown clock for me, but that’s the only consistent use I’ve ever had for it.
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That’s the problem Amazon (AMZN) and CEO Andy Jassy have with Alexa; it’s a product many consumers have tried and not many have found overly useful.
The digital assistant isn’t that great at playing the song I’m asking for, so I’m not confident it will be great at organizing my day. It can tell me the weather, maybe give me a sports score, but I rarely use it for any of those things.
It does politely greet me if I mention my sister-in-law Alexis, and it sometimes makes noise for no reason.
Amazon and Jassy, if they want to save Alexa, they have to fully change consumer behaviour around the device. It may not be a Clippy-level failure, but it’s a failure, and Clippy was at least cute.
Now, the company is back with a revised Alexa, and Jassy seems pretty excited that it can go from annoying novelty (my words) to useful AI-driven personal assistant (a paraphrase of his words).
“I want to briefly mention a few other items. As I’ve referenced a couple of times, in Q1, we introduced Alexa+. Our next-generation of Alexa personal assistant was meaningfully smarter and more capable than our prior self, can both answer virtually any question and take actions, and is free with Prime or available to non-Prime customers for $99 a month,” CEO Andy Jassy said during Amazon’s first-quarter earnings call.
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You may not have access to the new Alexa yet.
“We are just starting to roll this out in the U.S., and we’ll be expanding to additional countries later this year. People are really liking Alexa+ thus far,” he added.
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What does the new Alexa do?
Jassy tried to explain why the new Alexa will succeed where the old one failed.
“On the Alexa question, we’re really excited about Alexa+. And as I mentioned earlier, she’s much more intelligent, much more capable, and able to take real action. And to date, most of the agents that have been out there have really just been able to answer questions, which when it came out was very remarkable and, I think the future of agents is not just being intelligent, but also being able to take action,” he said.
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Making the service actually useful is not easy, and he acknowledged that things could easily go wrong.
“And that’s, actually, it requires a great model, but it also requires the ability to sync that model and to align that model with being able to take the right action and execute and implement the right APIs, or you can have, very suboptimal results. And so, we’ve worked hard on that in Alexa+. We’ve been — we started rolling out over the last several weeks. So, it’s with now over 100,000 users, with more rolling out in the coming months. And so far, the response from our customers has been very, very positive. People are excited about it,” Jassy added.
The CEO also made it clear that he needs to get consumers to change their behavior.
“I think that it does a lot more things than what Alexa did before. And we’re very fortunate in that we have over a half billion devices out there in people’s homes and offices and cars. So, we have a lot of distribution already, but there will be to some degree, there will be a little bit of rewiring for people on what they can do because you get used to patterns,” he shared.
No really, what does the new Amazon Alexa do?
Jassy did share some of the actual improvements made to the digital assistant.
“I mean, even the simple thing of not having to speak Alexa anymore where we’re all used to saying Alexa before we want every action to happen. And what you find is you really only have to do it the first time, and then really the conversation is ongoing where you don’t have to say Alexa anymore. And I’ve been lucky enough to have the alpha and the beta, that I’ve been playing with for several months, he said.
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Jassy did finally share an example of how the new Alexa might be put to use.
“So, you can do things like you have guests coming over on a Saturday night for dinner and you can say Alexa, please, open the shades, put the lights on in the driveway and on the porch, increase the temperature five degree and pick music that would be great for dinner that’s mellow. And she just does it. And like, when you have those types of experiences, it makes you want to do more of it, he shared.
Jassy has put the revised Alexa to the test.
“When I was in New York, when we were announcing, I asked her what were the, we did the event way downtown. I asked her, what was great Italian restaurants or pizza restaurants. She gave me a list and then she asked me if she wanted me to make a reservation. I said yes and she made the reservation, confirmed the time,” he added.
