Where are the users of Alexa+?
ALEXA, where are your users? More than six weeks after Amazon.com began rolling out the new Alexa+ generative artificial-intelligence (GenAI)-powered voice assistant to hundreds of thousands of people, there is scant evidence it is in regular customers' hands.
The new service was meant to be a triumph for Amazon after several delays in revamping Alexa in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT.
The company signalled its significance by bringing chief executive officer Andy Jassy to a February press event in New York where it showcased Alexa+'s capabilities and promised customers would start getting invite access in late March.
"There seems to be no one who actually has it," said Avi Greengart, lead analyst at Techsponential, who attended the Alexa+ announcement event.
"This fits a pattern of a lot of companies announcing services or products when they are awfully close to being ready, but not quite — that last mile is a lot farther away than they anticipated," he said.
In an ultimately unsuccessful effort to locate real-world users of Alexa+, Reuters searched dozens of news sites, YouTube, TikTok, X, BlueSky and Meta's Instagram and Facebook, as well as Amazon's Twitch and reviews of Echo voice-assistant devices on Amazon.com.
Two posted on Reddit claimed to have used the service, but did not provide hard evidence and their identities could not be corroborated.
"Hundreds of thousands of customers now have access to Alexa+ — of course, some are employees and their families, but the overwhelming majority are customers that requested early access," said an Amazon spokesman.
That is up from the approximately 100,000 users that Amazon reported on May 1.
Amazon did not say why there were no verifiable public reviews or reactions to the new service and declined to make available for an interview any active Alexa+ users.
The rollout of Alexa+ was proceeding slowly and the service had struggled with speed in answering some questions or prompts, said three sources.
It also occasionally generated inaccurate or fabricated information, like other AI models, and was expensive to operate, they said.
Accessed mainly through Amazon televisions and Echo devices, Alexa can set timers, answer search queries and tell the weather if a user requests it out loud.
While Apple's Siri voice assistant preceded the original Alexa by three years, it was the Amazon service that supercharged the acceptance of voice assistants.
The overhaul resulting in the GenAI-infused Alexa+ is meant to revitalise the decade-old service and help Amazon compete with chatbots from OpenAI, Meta and others.
Amazon has plowed billions into developing Alexa since it was introduced in 2014, but it has been unprofitable and the vision of customers using it for voice-shopping never materialised.
Technology companies typically rely on a mix of analysts, product reviewers, social media influencers and reporters to help get the word out about their newest devices or services.
Apple, considered a master of marketing, gives launch-event attendees limited access to its iPhones or laptops for initial reviews, followed shortly by lengthier scrutiny within days or weeks of announcement.
Amazon itself gave reviewers time to test out its new colour Kindle device at an event in October before making it available to buy just two weeks later.
In September 2023, Amazon showed off a prior iteration of the GenAI-infused Alexa and said customers would be getting an "early preview" of it within weeks. It never came.
Alexa+ will be able to respond to multiple prompts in sequence and even act as an "agent" on behalf of users by taking actions for them without their direct involvement.
That contrasts with the current iteration, which generally handles only a single request at a time. During Amazon's first-quarter earnings call two weeks ago, Jassy said more than 100,000 people were already using the new voice service and that "people are really liking Alexa+ thus far".
Americus Reed, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, said by leaving a large gap between product launch and general availability, Amazon was failing to build anticipation for Alexa+.
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