Apple has gotten a lot of flack for talking up Apple Intelligence while delivering very little of it, and now it seems Amazon is about to do the exact same thing.
A new report citing internal company documents suggests that Alexa+, Amazon’s equivalent of the new Siri, will also launch without many of its headline features …
Apple Intelligence embarrassment
Apple promised a new, conversational Siri and a whole lot more, but what has actually launched is essentially just tinkering around the edges.
The gulf between what Apple’s glossy videos promised, and what the company has so far delivered, is so enormous that the company was forced to pull an iPhone 16 ad focused on a feature which is currently complete fiction. I won’t retell every twist and turn along the way – some recent headlines alone are enough:
Now Alexa+ is doing the same
Amazon’s Alexa+ presentation was every bit as flash, promising a truly intelligent and useful voice assistant.
A demo video showed Alexa booking concert tickets, restaurant reservations and texting a babysitter. “She’s useful,” Panay repeated, before conducting what he said was a live conversation with the updated software. During the presentation, he demonstrated a flowing ongoing conversation — a departure from the stilted, single-question interactions Alexa users are familiar with.
But The Washington Post reports that Alexa+ too will be mostly vaporware when it launches next week.
Some of the new features Amazon previewed at the February event won’t become available for two months after Monday’s launch, and some will take even longer, according to internal company documents seen by The Washington Post […]
The delayed features that documents say don’t yet meet Amazon’s standards for public release include the ability to order takeout on Grubhub based on a conversation with Alexa+ about what you’re craving, or for Alexa+ to visually identify family members and remind them to do specific chores like walking the dog.
So, uh, the headline features shown off by the company in its announcement, then.
The piece also says that while you will be able to upload documents and ask Alexa+ to summarize them, there’s a teensy-weensy privacy problem: you won’t be able to delete those documents from Amazon’s server afterwards. The company apparently expects it to take several weeks to fix this.
Finally, Alexa+ won’t be available on any of the company’s standard smart speakers – you’ll need a recent Echo Show device to use it.
9to5Mac’s Take
This stuff is hard.
Chatbots like ChapGPT have essentially created a highly misleading view of how intelligent generative AI really is. Their output sounds intelligent, and well-informed, and trustworthy – but it’s actually none of those things. It’s simply a statistical sampling model figuring out which word is most likely to follow the current one when constructing a sentence or paragraph, based on analysis of human-written text in the (hopefully) relevant field.
Creating an AI system that simulates intelligence to a useful and reliable degree when working with your own personal data is a whole other ballgame, and it’s clear that both Apple and Amazon have promised capabilities they cannot yet deliver.
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