Amazon’s New AI-Powered Alexa Upgrade Could Launch Partnerships With Uber, Instacart, and Others

Amazon is planning for big things with its new Alexa upgrade, according to leaked documents outlined by Business Insider and Fortune, including potential partnerships with some of the biggest players in a variety of industries.

In detailing the contents of the documents concerning Amazon’s planned AI-powered Alexa upgrade, Business Insider mentioned that Amazon may end up partnering with Uber, Instacart, Ticketmaster, OpenTable, and others within a matter of years.

Amazon Partnerships Could Swell in Number Over Time

Amazon appears to have grand plans for its new Alexa rollout — initially codenamed Banyan or Remarkable Alexa — with hopes to bring in roughly 200 partners within three years of having launched the upgrade.

An AI-powered Alexa would ostensibly be able to hail a ride via Uber, make restaurant bookings through OpenTable, place a grocery order with Instacart, have food delivered to your door through Grubhub, and more.

In an email sent to Business Insider, an Amazon spokesperson clarified that not all of the concepts or ideas pitched in the documents may actually be enacted when the upgrade is finally delivered to end users.

“Our vision for Alexa is to build the world’s best personal assistant. Generative AI offers a huge opportunity to make Alexa even better for our customers, and we are working hard to enable even more proactive and capable assistance on the over half a billion Alexa-enabled devices already in homes around the world. We are excited about what we’re building and look forward to delivering it for our customers,” the spokesperson added.

AI-Powered Alexa Is Facing a Few Serious Problems

Despite the hype created by the release of Amazon’s internal documents, not everything appears to be going to plan.

The primary problem? Latency. Amazon’s internal documents suggest that the AI-powered assistant may struggle to come up with answers or deliver solutions to user requests in a timely manner. A great degree of lag could ultimately prove frustrating or annoying to those trying to interact with the new Alexa, and this is apparently a current pain point concerning the project.

“Latency remains a critical issue requiring significant improvements,” the documents reveal, going on to indicate that these nagging issues would have to be resolved before launching the product.

As Fortune reported, Amazon is currently perceived to be lagging behind competitors in the personal assistant space, and despite having attracted hundreds of millions of Alexa users, those users continue to express disappointment in Alexa’s performance. Because Alexa is not capable of carrying on complex back-and-forth discussions, instead pulling from a bank of pre-established responses and routines when queried, the Alexa experience is not as nuanced — nor as desirable — as interactions with full-fledged AI models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Finally, there is another issue — one concerning obsolescence. According to Fortune, those customers who own older Amazon Echo devices won’t be able to update their devices to work with the new Alexa assistant.

“Nearly 10% of people who are active users of the voice assistant through Amazon Echo devices — or 3.8 million people in total — won’t be able to access the new version through those devices,” Fortune reported.