Amazon’s Alexa Ambition Comes At a Steep Cost: ‘Killed My Fish’

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy revealed in his annual shareholder letter earlier this year that Alexa, the company’s voice assistant, has “scale and a very large customer base,” with 600 million active devices across devices, cars and offices. 

Amazon is now working to upgrade Alexa and expand its reach. Leaked internal planning documents recently reviewed by Business Insider reveal that Amazon is working on a new Alexa project, codenamed Moonraker, to further embed Alexa into the lives of its customers. 

Moonraker makes Alexa more capable. Alexa+, the AI-powered side of Alexa, already allows users to book rides through Uber and buy tickets through Ticketmaster with just a voice command. Moonraker goes further and permits Alexa to carry out multi-step actions from one request. It makes Alexa more like an AI agent that can work autonomously to handle customer tasks than just a voice assistant. 

The documents show that Moonraker can complete a multi-step action in response to a single request, such as “book me a ride and text my friend.” 

The technology is proving expensive to develop. Internal documents viewed by Business Insider show that the Moonraker AI upgrade has become one of the most costly parts of Amazon’s next Alexa+ revamp, incurring more than $100 million in AI chip costs this year. The documents proposed delaying or downsizing the project as a way to decrease costs. 

One source told Business Insider that some Amazon leaders think the company has overspent on developing the AI models behind Alexa. They are worried that the models cost too much to run. 

Alexa accidentally killed a beta tester’s fish

Amazon has also been working through some speed bumps as it creates an AI-powered Alexa. The company pushed back the release of Alexa+ before rolling out the service to the U.S. this year. According to Business Insider’s previous reports from earlier this year, tests showed that Alexa+ faced hallucinations and gave inaccurate responses. One employee reported that the voice assistant mistakenly killed their pet fish. 

“When I ask Alexa to turn off the light, it should turn off the light, not everything on the strip,” the employee wrote in a Slack channel for workers to share feedback on Alexa+ features, per Business Insider. “It turned off the power strip that my aquarium filter is on and killed my fish.”

Other beta testers noted that the assistant talked incessantly, even though they asked it to stop. In another instance, Alexa+ played music at full volume when there was no one present in the house. 

“The behavior has become unbearably erratic,” one employee wrote in the Slack channel. “I just wanted to test the new experiences, but I wasn’t expecting to get everything messed up.”

Despite these hiccups, an AI-powered Alexa has proven popular with users. According to Jassy’s shareholder letter, users are talking to Alexa twice as much and completing three times more purchases on devices since the release of AI features earlier this year. 

“Alexa is still early in its journey to be the world’s best personal assistant,” Jassy wrote in the letter.