Alexa at 10: Amazon’s assistant is a winner and a failure

Alexa didn’t get a big splashy launch event, or come with a bunch of grand proclamations about being the future of anything. Instead, like a phone charger with a made-up name or a knockoff version of your favorite blush, it just kind of appeared on Amazon one day.

Ten years ago this week, on November 6th, 2014, Amazon launched the Echo and the smart speaker era. The device quickly spawned countless more, from Amazon and others. It became the emblem of a voice-first way of using technology, the “ambient computing” revolution Amazon and others came to believe would change how we do everything. Now there are Alexa devices in millions of homes, just listening and chirping away all day.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we wrestle with what all that really adds up to. The Verge’s Jennifer Pattison Tuohy joins the show to talk about the reasons for that surprise 2014 launch, the explosive growth of the Alexa ecosystem, and the challenges Amazon and everyone else faced in trying to figure out what these smart speakers could really do. By some measures, Alexa is an undeniable hit, an utterly mainstream part of our technological lives. But for all that success, Alexa has never lived up to Amazon’s lofty goals. It’s not the ultra-powerful and ultra-versatile Star Trek computer; it’s not even a better way to shop. After all this time, it’s for music and timers. Alexa has always been for music and timers.

There’s a big change coming for Alexa, though. We talk a lot about what the so-called “Remarkable Alexa” upgrade might mean for the virtual assistant, as Amazon shifts its underlying technology to be based on large language models and generative AI. It’s pretty clear now that Amazon’s big idea was something like the right one. Is the tech finally ready to make it real? And will Amazon ever ship the thing so we can find out? The Echo was a surprise a decade ago — maybe we’re due for another one.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started: