Fashionably late or just late? Alexa was supposed to be the belle of the ball of Amazon’s February 26 event, where Amazon is expected to pull the wraps off an updated Alexa incorporating more AI. But according to a leak in The Washington Post, consumers won’t see the Alexa update go live until March 31. Maybe later.
Luckily for journalism, but unluckily for us, it seems to be a credible rumor, as the news is based upon “internal messages seen by The Washington Post and an Amazon employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job,” as WaPo put it.
later than you think
The February 26 unveiling is already a make-up day. Amazon’s been tight-lipped with the public, but it’s made a tradition in recent years of holding a fall event for new hardware. Last year’s fall came and went without a word amid rumors that the upcoming Alexa wasn’t meeting expectations.
Now again, Alexa seems not to be meeting expectations. It was caught giving incorrect answers to test questions,, according to WaPo’s conversation with their anonymous employee source.
It was The Verge who figured out the February 26 event announcement was a clue that literally spelled out Alexa. Placed side by side in the right order, the five announcement cards sent out by Amazon show that everybody’s hunch was right—the event would heavily feature Alexa.
That makes Alexa’s last-minute delay all the more embarrassing. Amazon so far seems to be holding to their February 26 event. Whereas it was the game plan to unveil the newly improved Alexa on the new devices, now it looks like Amazon is either going to have to use the existing version of Alexa on their brand new devices.
Or if Amazon does feature the latest build of Alexa, it’ll have to very carefully curate the questions and commands posed to it, in order not to display its ignorance in front of millions, the equivalent of tumbling down a staircase at your own party.
We might not get to see much of a preview of Alexa’s alleged new capabilities, but at least we can hear Amazon tell us stuff about it… and things. That’s something, right?
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