Get the latest tech news

How Alexa dropped the ball on being the top conversational system

I discuss why Alexa missed the opportunity to take the lead and become the dominant player in the conversational AI market.

Dozens of new teams sprouted every quarter, huge financial resources were invested, and senior leadership made it clear that Alexa was going to be one of Amazon’s big bets moving forward. And most importantly, there was no immediate story for the team’s PM to make a promotion case through fixing this issue other than “it’s scientifically the right thing to do and could lead to better models for some other team.” No incentive meant no action taken. For example, in one of our projects to build an open-domain chat system, the success metric (i.e. a single integer value representing overall conversational quality) imposed by senior leadership had no scientific grounding and was borderline impossible to achieve.

Get the Android app