The Tech Giants All Want to Build The Same AI Assistant. Can Amazon Pull It Off?

Will the new Alexa make sense of your shopping, entertainment, and lifestyle habits to become the first useful, contextually aware, universal assistant?

This week, Amazon unveiled a long-awaited Alexa update, finally integrating cutting edge generative AI into its pioneering voice bot. On stage, the company’s executives showed Alexa hailing a cab, researching baseball tickets, making a restaurant reservation, and sending a text — all via voice command.

The Alexa presentation was slick, but felt similar to those at recent developer events from Apple, Google, Meta, and OpenAI. All these companies want to build contextually aware assistants that help you get things done in the real world. And to date, none have fully delivered.

But Amazon does have a chance to be the company that pulls it off. For one, it presented working demos of its product — which it promised would go live next month — not just videos and a vision. The company also has a massive amount of information about what we do and like, knowing our shopping habits, entertainment preferences, and more via Amazon services that plug into Alexa. And it has hundreds of millions of Alexa devices around the world waiting to become more useful.

“You have music, shopping, movies. These are real things that people love doing in the home,” Panos Panay, Amazon’s head of devices and services, told me, speaking of Amazon’s proprietary services. “I don't think there's anyone close to be able to understand your home as Amazon, as Alexa.”

To be useful to you, a contextually aware AI assistant must understand your context. And Amazon has heaps of data that could help Alexa figure it out. If you’re a Prime member — of which there are hundreds of millions — Amazon might know what you watch, listen to, read, and do for leisure. Plus who’s coming in and out of your home. Then, there are thousands of third party services that already integrate with Alexa. With the implementation of modern LLMs, Alexa could go from a ‘set a timer’ app to something that, at the most ideal state, might call a repairman and get the right part to your home just as he arrives.

The biggest liability for Amazon, of course, is that it doesn’t have a phone, limiting Alexa’s ease of use outside of the home. Google and Apple’s assistants are always available to people who carry their mobile devices, yet Amazon can’t build Alexa into a mobile operating system. The default on those operating systems matter, which is why Google pays Apple billions of dollars to be the default search engine on iPhones.

Amazon, understanding this, is releasing a web version of the new Alexa, available at Alexa.com, and already has a mobile app, giving it a chance to play on the phone — and elsewhere — if its assistant is good enough. “We have the Alexa app on the phone. And with one touch of the button on your iPhone, you're having the same conversation,” Panay said. “You're actually carrying the conversation from your home to your phone to your car to your PC with Alexa.com.”

Amazon might also benefit from not being locked into a mobile operating system in that it can integrate everything and not privilege its own productivity services. At the Alexa release event on Wednesday, Amazon Prime head Jamil Ghani told me his family uses a Google calendar with Alexa at home, for instance.

Amazon also has 600 million+ Alexa enabled devices in the world. So a software update that makes them more useful could instantly vault Alexa toward the top of the category given the latent demand. But as with its tech giant counterparts, the proof of the new Alexa’s viability will be in the experience itself. Until Amazon turns on Alexa+ — as it’s calling it — for the public, we’ll have to reserve judgment. But it certainly has a chance to get this right.

Amazon’s devices head Panos Panay and Alexa head Daniel Rausch will join Big Technology Podcast for a deep discussion about the rearchitecture of Alexa next week, You can find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your app of choice.

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Number of The Week

$19.99

That’s how much non-prime users can expect to pay for Amazon’s Alexa+ every month. Powered by Amazon’s own AI models and Anthropic’s Claude model, the service will turn Alexa and Echo into a “personal AI assistant.”

Quote of The Week

"We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets."

Jeff Bezos announcing the resignation of WaPo opinion editor David Shipley and the column’s new direction.

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