Amazon Faces Moment of Truth on Alexa as ChatGPT Steals Its Thunder
Five years ago, Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant had it all: high-profile partnerships, booming device sales and plenty of industry and pop culture buzz. But ChatGPT has grabbed the spotlight in AI at a delicate moment when critics say Alexa has stagnated.
At the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show, Amazon announced one of its biggest partnerships yet to help make its Alexa voice assistant ubiquitous: a deal with Toyota to integrate Alexa into the auto giant’s cars. “Our vision for Alexa is that she should be everywhere a customer might need her—at home, in the office, on phones—and in cars,” an Amazon executive gushed in a press release about the agreement.
Toyota doesn’t seem to need Alexa anymore. The automaker has dropped support for an app that allowed users to operate Alexa in their cars via smartphones in 2023 editions of several of its most popular models, including the RAV4, Prius and Corolla. And according to a person close to the automaker, Toyota plans to phase out Alexa integration from the rest of its lineup in the coming years. The automaker is now focused on improving an in-house voice assistant it launched last year and is considering integrating ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI, into it, the person said.
Toyota’s breakup with Alexa, details of which haven’t been reported previously, is a potent symbol of the challenges facing Amazon’s once-mighty voice assistant. Despite selling hundreds of millions of digital devices with the assistant built into them, Alexa has fallen short of Amazon’s goal of creating the next big platform in tech. Even onetime believers in the technology say innovation has stalled on Alexa, a sentiment that has grown since ChatGPT set the tech world ablaze when it came out in November.