- A former Amazon employee has criticized the company’s handling of its Alexa voice assistant.
- Mikhail Eric said at X that technical and bureaucratic issues were hindering Alexa’s development.
- He said Amazon had the resources to become the “clear” leader in conversational AI but failed.
A former employee says Amazon “failed” with its voice assistant Alexa.
Mikhail Eric, a former senior machine learning scientist at Alexa AI, wrote in a lengthy X post that he feels Amazon missed an opportunity to make Alexa a flagship product as competitors make progress with their own AI-powered voice assistants.
“We had all the resources, talent and momentum to become the undisputed market leader in conversational AI,” Eric wrote on Tuesday.
He adds: “But most of that technology never saw the light of day or received the press it deserved. Why? The reality is that Alexa AI was riddled with technical and bureaucratic problems.”
Eric, who left Amazon in 2021, according to his LinkedIn profile, said Amazon may have missed an opportunity to dominate in conversational AI due to “poor technical processes,” “organizational fragmentation,” and “misalignment between product and science.”
In his view, Amazon’s infrastructure was “painfully painful” for developers because of the guardrails it puts in place to protect user data, and it has limited computing resources to run experiments, he added.
Eric also argued that Alexa’s progress was being hindered by an organizational structure that created overlaps between teams working on similar challenges.
“This led to an almost Darwinian dynamic in which teams were desperate to get their work done in order to avoid being restructured and absorbed by a rival team,” he writes.
Eric said the Alexa team had to “constantly explain its existence” to senior management, and weekly meetings were riddled with conflict between the product and science teams. He said this led to a rotation of managers every few months and stalled efforts to make Alexa a multimodal agent in Amazon’s customers’ homes.
Eric also said that after OpenAI released its multimodal GPT-4o model with a voice assistant called Sky, he received a message from a former Alexa colleague saying, “I thought voice assistants were Alexa’s forte.”
Amazon and Eric did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s requests for comment, made outside of normal working hours.
