The Voice Chatbot Wars: Alexa is Losing Badly
Trends
March 23, 2023
The struggles of Amazon continue.
Today, they’re taking it in the shin as we focus on their voice assistant, Alexa.
Amazon’s big Alexa bet is struggling nearly 10 years after launching.
- Last year, the division was on pace to lose $10B, with one former employee calling Alexa a “colossal failure.”
- Alexa’s technology is falling behind. It’s struggling to monetize, employee morale is low and user engagement is falling (Insider).
Big customers are leaving. Early Alexa adopter, Sonos, is reportedly moving towards its own voice assistant — with customers unhappy about Alexa and Google Assistant’s accuracy and speed.
Toyota has also dropped Alexa support from several 2023 models — with plans to phase out Alexa completely. Instead, they’re focusing on their voice assistant — and even considering integrating ChatGPT…
…The 7 letters no tech giant wants to hear
Well, except Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella, who recently called all voice assistants (including his own Cortana) “dumb as a rock.” But with Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership, that could quickly change.
ChatGPT is becoming a big risk for Amazon — which had nearly 10K employees working on Alexa-related products compared to 375 OpenAI employees, per The Information.
- Amazon has reportedly approached several AI startups to improve Alexa and others parts of Amazon.
- It might not be long before we see an AI-powered voice assistant. Question is, which tech giant will take the lead?
