Amazon’s Panos Panay announced Alexa Plus last week, representing a renewed focus on software for the company’s troubled consumer electronics division.
The biggest surprise at Amazonâs press conference last week was the lack of hardware announcements. Traditionally, Amazon announces dozens of new gadgets at its events, but this time, Amazon spent 70 minutes talking about software. Specifically, Alexa Plus, its new generative AI-powered Alexa voice assistant. And that was exactly the right move.
Over the past decade, the company has spent way too much money building cheap hardware for Alexa that no one really likes, developing home robots and flying indoor cameras no one really needs, and wasting efforts on failed ways for people to interact with Alexa (the Loop, the Microwave, the Clock, and so on), all while the core technology itself stagnated.
Imagine what could have been if Amazon had focused all that time and money on making Alexa really good. For a start, weâd be a lot closer to Jeff Bezos’ original vision of replicating Star Trekâs âComputerâ and much further away from what Alexa essentially is today, a very expensive-to-build timer.
But with the launch of Alexa Plus, Amazon has finally taken a big step toward that goal. The voice assistant has been âone hundred percent re-architected,” Amazonâs head of …
