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Amazon's Rohit Prasad
- Amazon wants its Alexa virtual assistant to become more proactive and anticipate a user's needs before they ask, said two company executives.
- Doing so would undoubtedly escalate the competition with Google, which has also launched new features for its assistant that enable it to take action on a user's behalf.
- Miriam Daniel, Amazon's vice president of Echo and Alexa devices, says she anticipates that Alexa's "Hunches" feature could evolve to handle more cumbersome tasks on the user's behalf over the next four to five years.
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If you own an Amazon Echo, you're probably used to frequently uttering the name "Alexa" whenever you want to play some music, turn off the lights in another room, or check the weather.
But if Amazon has its way, its digital assistant will get much better at serving up information and completing tasks even before you ask - a goal that puts it in an even tighter race with Google, which has launched similarly proactive features for its own virtual helper in recent months.
"Alexa needs to anticipate what the goal is," said Rohit Prasad, Amazon's vice president and head scientist for Alexa. "And a customer's goal will keep evolving."
Introduced in the original Echo in 2014, Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant has emerged as the frontrunner when it comes to intelligent voice assistants in the home. Amazon accounted for 25.4% of worldwide smart speaker shipments in the second quarter of 2019, overcoming rivals like Baidu and Google, according to Canalys.
While Amazon's advertising and cloud businesses are its most lucrative divisions, Alexa has most certainly become the face - or perhaps, voice - of the company's consumer products. In recent years, it's become routine for the e-commerce giant to introduce dozens of Alexa-powered devices each fall ahead of the holiday season - as it recently did in late September when it introduced eight new Echo devices among other announcements.
Read more: Amazon's new Echo launch makes Apple's presence in the home more uncertain than ever
The company also now has more than 10,000 employees working on its Alexa and Echo products, as Dave Limp, senior vice president of Amazon Devices, said at a Wall Street Journal conference in 2018. More than 100 million Alexa devices had been sold as of January 2019, as The Verge reported earlier this year.
Amazon wants Alexa to be more intuitive
If Alexa's next phase of growth is all about becoming more intuitive, Amazon has already laid the breadcrumbs for how it will get there through its "Hunches" feature, according to Miriam Daniel, Amazon's vice president of Echo and Alexa devices. That feature enables Alexa to offer suggestions proactively if it senses that you may have forgotten to turn off the lights after uttering the "Good night" command, for example.
But the current iteration of "Hunches" is likely just the beginning, says Daniel. Eventually, Amazon hopes to refine and develop that functionality to handle more complicated tasks. For example, imagine a scenario in which asking Alexa about which movies are playing tonight could prompt it to offer to reserve a dinner table or call an Uber. "Think about taking Hunches many steps forward, right?" Daniel said. "We could see this going in so many different directions where Alexa can think ahead for you and kind of be a little bit more proactive on your behalf."
REUTERS/Elijah Nouvelage
But to get to that point, Alexa will have to be able to do more than just understand your words - it'll have to comprehend your intent as well. When you perform a web search for a product like a camera for example, there could be many reasons why you're doing so. You may want to purchase a new camera, or you may just be interested in learning about them, Prasad noted as an example. In order for Alexa to be more proactive, it needs to know why you're asking a question or making a request in the first place.
Read more: Amazon doesn't see Apple's AirPods as a threat to its new Echo Buds, says company executive
Alexa will continue facing stiff competition from the Google Assistant
Amazon's ambition to make Alexa more intuitive sounds an awful lot like the approach Google is taking with the Google Assistant. If you look at some of the recent updates to the Google Assistant announced earlier this year, many of them similarly involve handling tasks on your behalf and gaining a better understanding of the important people, places, and things in your life.
At the search giant's developer conference in May, for example, the company unveiled a new feature that allows the Assistant to remember specific contacts when they're referenced in requests. That means you can ask a question like, "What will the weather be like near mom's house?" and Google will understand that you're talking about your mother and will answer accordingly. It also announced that the Assistant will be able to perform errands such as booking a car for an upcoming trip by using information stored in services like Gmail and Chrome.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Google shows off its Home smart speaker
It's not precisely the scenario that Daniel described, but the underlying idea is the same: understand the context around a user's preferences, and proactively provide assistance accordingly.
Although Amazon remains the market leader in the smart speaker space, some industry research has suggested that Google is steadily catching up. Strategy Analytics reported in August 2018, for example, that Amazon's share of the market dipped in the second quarter of 2018 while Google's grew. Similarly, a study from Voicebot.ai and Voicify published in early 2019 found that Google's market share jumped from 18.4% in January 2018 to 23.9% during the same month in 2019, while Amazon's slice of the market dipped from 71.9% to 61.1% in the same period.
But the market is always changing, as evidenced by a recent Canalys report which indicated that Baidu surpassed Google to claim the second place spot behind Amazon when it comes to worldwide sales in the second quarter of 2019.
Amazon is trying to build a more personal Alexa as privacy concerns continue
Often times, teaching a digital assistant more about you often involves sharing more about yourself - such as your home and work addresses, your frequent contacts, and other details that apps and services often use to serve up relevant information. That could prove challenging as companies like Amazon and Google come under increased scrutiny when it comes to personal privacy and how they handle consumer data.
The Seattle-based tech behemoth found itself in some controversy earlier this year after Bloomberg published a report detailing how Amazon workers who annotate Alexa recordings sometimes overhear private conversations. Amazon has since rolled out privacy-focused features that make it easier to delete Alexa recordings and now allows users to opt out of having its manual review process.
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In the future, Amazon hopes to have to rely less on human annotations as its artificial intelligence systems get better at learning directly from user input. The new frustration detection feature Amazon announced at the end of September, which enables the digital helper to tell when a user may be annoyed if it misunderstands a request, is the result of such efforts, says Prasad. "We have a lot of unsupervised signals as well," he said. "And we'll continue to invent new ways of learning without annotation."
As for teaching Alexa to understand that you may want to have an Uber scheduled to pick you up before your movie that evening without having to ask, that could be the norm perhaps four or five years out, says Daniel. But it can be difficult even for Amazon's own executives to predict exactly where Alexa might go.
Daniel tells me that one of the most surprising things she's learned in the years since the first Echo launched is how critical Alexa has become for the smart home. It may not be an exaggeration to call Alexa the smart home's biggest success story; it can now be found in everything from washing machines to light bulbs and lawn sprinkler controllers. But according to Daniel, Amazon didn't quite expect for smart home controls to be such a big hit with customers.
"We never expected that to take off," she said. "We had one vendor when we first started, now we have 85,000 smart devices that can be controlled by Alexa. . . That was a great surprise."
