I don’t use Alexa to shop on Amazon, for example, because I don’t trust that I’m getting all the information I need about what I’m buying. It also means you have to trust Alexa, not only in terms of privacy (where Amazon has made repeated mistakes) but also trusting that the assistant will do what you’ve asked. You might use Alexa to set up a morning routine in your smart home, but that will take time. The third problem is the most immediate: getting Alexa to work as advertised requires too much effort and trust from users.
You live on your phone any assistant needs to be there, too. This puts a limit on its ability to function as a daily helper. It’s omnipresent in households, but I don’t know anyone who uses it instead of Siri or Google Assistant on their phone.
Second is Alexa’s absence on mobile devices. It’s our greatest civilization tool, and although we can use verbal tricks to give computers the appearance of comprehension, these shortcuts don’t hold up for long. Language is just inherently nuanced and human. But any interaction more complex than that is still out of bounds. Thanks to new machine learning techniques, we’ve gotten pretty good at turning the audio of speech into text from which we can extract basic commands. First is the difficulty of getting computers to understand language, a challenge I saw first-hand while covering Amazon’s $3.5 million Alexa Prize. Alexa is now available in gadgets of all shapes and sizes. But Amazon has been promising this sort of functionality for a long time, and it doesn’t seem to be a whole lot closer to its goal. This, says Amazon, will allow it to tackle more complex tasks (like ordering an Uber or notifying you about a delayed flight) more naturally and gracefully. It’s churned out new features like whisper mode, Alexa Guard, and Alexa routines while banging away at the underlying promise that Alexa is slowly getting better at conversations and chit-chat. The company has also poured huge resources into making Alexa more usable. On a cultural level, Alexa has even managed to give the cut-throat and merciless Amazon a bit of personality. It’s sold more than 100 million Echo devices, integrated Alexa with 85,000 smart home products, and its app store now boasts over 100,000 skills. The company has added its voice assistant to a cornucopia of gadgets, from smart rings to microwaves. No one would disagree that Alexa has been a huge success for Amazon. But like many users, I’ve learned that posing any trickier queries is asking for trouble.Īlexa is ubiquitous, but that doesn’t make it useful Don’t get me wrong, I think the Echo performs these functions pretty well. Years later, I still have an Echo, and I still use it for the exact same tasks. Photo by Chris Welch / The Vergeįor me, the answer is a clear “no.” I started using an Echo speaker not long after it became available in the UK, and after messing around with some lackluster skills on Amazon’s haunted house of an app store, I quickly settled on a few key use cases: playing music and radio, setting timers, and occasionally asking about the weather and Wikipedia-level trivia. You might have Alexa in your kitchen, on your bedside table, or even in your car.īut half a decade after Alexa launched, there’s a lingering question: has Amazon’s assistant actually become more useful? Years later, I still use my Echo for the same basic jobs.
If you have children and an Alexa device, they probably know how to ask the robot to play their favorite songs at breakfast. “Well this one came out of nowhere,” was the reaction of Verge reporter Chris Welch.įive years later, Alexa is a household name - literally. Five years ago today, Amazon surprised the tech press by unveiling Alexa and the Echo, its first smart speaker.