Alexa may get smarter with more APIs rather than more AI

Following ongoing reports that Amazon’s generative AI makeover of Alexa is not going well, it appears Amazon may take a more practical approach to making its smart assistant more useful. According to Business Insider, Amazon is partnering with several companies to make Alexa better at doing things you might want a digital assistant to do: including calling an Uber, tackling Ticketmaster for events, booking dinner through OpenTable, and handling GrubHub and Instacart for your food delivery.

Amazon wants to make the new Alexa capable of completing an entire task for a user rather than handing it off to a third party, as it largely does with Skills. BI reports that these partner companies would become the “primary option for handling those specific tasks on the upgraded Alexa.” So, for example, when you ask Alexa to order that pizza you got last week from that place you like, it could potentially link into your GrubHub account and order you a pepperoni and pineapple, saving you several minutes of fiddling with your phone.

According to BI, the partnerships aren’t final. In fact, an Amazon spokesperson told the publication that any product development process features ideas that “don’t necessarily reflect what the experience will be when we roll it out for our customers.” 

The approach is an interesting antidote to the generative-AI hype around voice assistants. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel here, just make the wheel better. While the report didn’t include technical details, if Amazon is partnering with companies, it may well be to leverage a much more tried-and-true solution than generative AI: APIs.

Instead of unleashing an LLM-powered assistant on a service or website and telling it to execute a task for you (a model that companies like Rabbit and Humane AI have tried with limited success), Amazon could just use a smarter, more conversational Alexa to make the clunky command and control structure of API calls more seamless. While technically much less ambitious, if it makes for a smoother experience ordering your pizza via voice than with the current Alexa Skills process, that’s an improvement all round.

The downside is that if Amazon relies on partnerships to provide this functionality, your local pizza place may not be on that list. (Mine only just got online ordering, and it’s spotty at best.) According to BI’s source, Amazon expects to have around 200 partners by Q3 next year. Depending on who those partners are, this approach of “let’s make sure this actually works” rather than “here’s a chatbot that might try to add pinecones to your pizza” feels like a better solution.