Amazon CEO says 100,000 users now have Alexa+

Amazon’s upgraded digital assistant powered by generative AI, Alexa+, has been released to over 100,000 users, as announced by CEO Andy Jassy during the company’s earnings call on Thursday.

Although this number is significantly lower than the 600 million Alexa devices currently in use, Amazon is steadily progressing with the rollout of Alexa+, which was initially introduced in February. The company had stated that Alexa+ would be released in phases over the following months.

The new digital assistant from Amazon is designed to facilitate more natural conversations with users and is expected to eventually possess agentic capabilities that enable it to interact with third-party apps on behalf of the user. Alexa+ will be capable of generating spontaneous responses, similar to the voice modes in OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, rather than relying on pre-programmed responses like the older versions of Alexa and Siri.

However, as reported by The Washington Post at launch, the current version of Alexa+ lacks some of the features demonstrated in February. The report highlighted that the initial release of Alexa+ does not support functionalities such as using third-party apps like GrubHub, creating bedtime stories for children, or suggesting gift ideas. The timeline for incorporating these features into Alexa+ remains uncertain.

Jassy mentioned during the call, “We have many more features planned for the upcoming months.”

In his opening remarks, Jassy emphasized that Alexa+ is among the first action-oriented AI agents for consumers. However, he acknowledged that this technology is still considered “primitive” and “inaccurate.” Jassy revealed that most multi-step AI agents currently have a low accuracy rate, ranging between 30% and 60%. He set a target for Amazon’s web-browsing agent, Nova Act, which powers Alexa+, to achieve 90% accuracy in this domain.

Amazon’s rollout of Alexa+ appears to be advancing more rapidly than Apple’s rollout of its new LLM-powered Siri. When questioned about the delays in the new Siri release during Apple’s earnings call on the same day as Amazon’s, CEO Tim Cook stated that the company required “additional time to finalize the work.”

In the journey to enhance traditional digital assistants with generative AI, both Apple and Amazon have encountered challenges and delays. Difficulties have arisen in getting LLMs to integrate with tools and systems, which are essential for Alexa and Siri to perform practical tasks like setting timers and reading messages. Implementing these features has proven to be more complex than initially anticipated.