Apple has gotten a lot of flack for talking up Apple Intelligence while delivering very little of it, and now it seems Amazon is about to do the exact same thing.A new report citing internal company documents suggests that Alexa+, Amazon’s equivalent of the new Siri, will also launch without many of its headline features … Apple Intelligence embarrassment Apple promised a new, conversational Siri and a whole lot more, but what has actually launched is essentially just tinkering around the edges.The gulf between what Apple’s glossy videos promised, and what the company has so far delivered, is so enormous that the company was forced to pull an iPhone 16 ad focused on a feature which is currently complete fiction.
I won’t retell every twist and turn along the way – some recent headlines alone are enough: Apple commenter John Gruber launches blistering attack on ‘rotten’ Apple over Siri vaporware Apple exec slams ‘ugly and embarrassing’ Siri delays in all-hands meeting Siri has become an unmitigated disaster, and AI won’t save it Apple hit with lawsuit over ‘false advertising’ of Apple Intelligence features Now Alexa+ is doing the same Amazon’s Alexa+ presentation was every bit as flash, promising a truly intelligent and useful voice assistant.But reports that Alexa+ too will be mostly vaporware when it launches next week.So, uh, the headline features shown off by the company in its announcement, then.
The piece also says that while you will be able to upload documents and ask Alexa+ to summarize them, there’s a teensy-weensy privacy problem: you won’t be able to delete those documents from Amazon’s server afterwards.The company apparently expects it to take several weeks to fix this.Finally, Alexa+ won’t be available on any of the company’s standard smart speakers – you’ll need a recent Echo Show device to use it.
9to5Mac’s Take This stuff is hard.Chatbots like ChapGPT have essentially created a highly misleading view of how intelligent generative AI really is.Their output intelligent, and well-informed, and trustworthy – but it’s actually none of those things.
It’s simply a statistical sampling model figuring out which word is most likely to follow the current one when constructing a sentence or paragraph, based on analysis of human-written text in the (hopefully) relevant field.Creating an AI system that simulates intelligence to a useful and reliable degree when working with your own personal data is a whole other ballgame, and it’s clear that both Apple and Amazon have promised capabilities they cannot yet deliver.Highlighted accessories Amazon Echo Show 5 MagSafe Car Mount for iPhone Apple MagSafe Charger with 25w power for iPhone 16 models Apple 30W charger for above Anker 240W braided USB-C to USB-C cable You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day.
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