Alexa, why haven’t smart speakers evolved?

I’m puzzled by the failure of smart speakers such as Amazon’s Echo, which we all know as Alexa, or Google Assistant, to incorporate the many advantages that generative AI offers, leaving them in danger of being replaced by chatbots.

In short, what happened to a device that seemed destined to become the center of digital ecosystems? Anybody who has bought one over the last decade can’t help but have noticed that they do practically the same thing they did at the time of acquiring them. It looks like a colossal strategic failure on the part of Amazon to have allowed an entire business division to lose more than $10 billion, creating a problem for the entire company, for want of a clearly defined business model.

After numerous layoffs, the company says it is still committed to developing the device and is preparing a new massive language model, an enhance LLM specializing in the most common types of questions, that will lead to a new subscription-based Alexa Plus or Remarkable Alexa that is already being trialed with a few hundred consumers.

The problem, however, remains the same: so far, only Google has come up with generative algorithms capable of running on a small device, with its Gemini Nano incorporated into its Pixel 8 Pro smartphone, which seems the only way to ensure limited resource consumption. As long as these…