Alexa, What’s Your Future? Perhaps Finally Making Money
The departing executive in charge of Amazon’s voice assistant has a conversation about its future in the age of AI.
Dave Limp has high hopes for an AI-enhanced Alexa.
Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg
When Amazon.com Inc. executive Dave Limp announced in August that he would leave by the end of this year, I wrote that he would depart without having satisfactorily answered the question of what Alexa was for and why the gadget-buying public truly needed the voice-assistant technology.
Amazon seemed to be having similar queries — Limp’s unit, reported to have been burning through $5 billion a year, was hit harshly by recent cutbacks at the company. Meanwhile, the explosion of AI, kick-started by the launch of ChatGPT, has drastically redefined what a digital assistant could be expected to do. Alexa looked comparatively stupid: ChatGPT users were writing essays; Alexa users were setting egg timers.