Amazon’s secret war on Android: The company has a plan to cure Alexa’s addiction to Google’s operating system.
Tech
By Eugene Kim | 2024-03-06T10:00:02Z
Amazon’s Alexa division is cutting costs across the board, having laid off thousands of employees and reshuffled projects over the past 18 months. Another key part of that plan is to unify Alexa’s backend technology, which is set to result in some devices moving off of the Android-based operating system the company has used for years, Business Insider has learned.
Internally named “Unified Alexa Device Software,” the project is aimed at delivering a “single Alexa Device Software codebase” that will help reduce operational costs and address various performance issues, according to internal documents obtained by BI and people familiar with the matter. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press.
The team in charge of the project expects to ultimately save almost 50% of its overhead costs, one of the documents says. Once completed, Amazon expects a faster rollout of Alexa features, improved customer experience, and less developer friction, among other benefits.
“With the unified Alexa backend, Amazon plans to more actively use a new homegrown operating system named Vega for voice assistants, smart TVs, and wearable devices, one of the documents says. Vega is a ‘new portable operating system for consumer electronics developed by Amazon,’ the document explains. Two people told BI that some of the Alexa-powered devices were already using Vega.
Amazon has tried to unify Alexa’s software stack since at least 2016, but failure to do so has only deepened existing problems, the document says. Amazon, at one point, had four different teams supporting the same voice middleware technology across different devices, causing higher operational costs and inefficiencies.
The feature-parity gap between Amazon’s own Alexa devices and third-party voice assistants using Alexa has long been a problem, both internally and externally, according to the people.
They said Amazon’s own devices, such as the Echo, usually got new features ahead of third-party devices, but some employees felt the technology used in Amazon’s devices was much more robust and mature than the tech found in external Alexa-powered gadgets. That has generated negative customer feedback and deteriorating partner relationships.
The new unified Alexa foundation will significantly reduce these feature parity gaps, the internal documents predict. For example, prior to unifying the backend, one of Alexa’s wake-word-detection features existed only for the Fire OS, so Amazon had to separately build one for the Vega OS, the document says.
With the new Vega OS, Amazon is reducing its reliance on the Android-based Fire OS. But the people told BI the move wasn’t necessarily motivated by ditching Google’s technology. Instead, they said, the goal was simply to be more efficient with resources and to improve performance.
“It’s also an acknowledgment that Alexa has not scaled the way Amazon had expected it to,” this person said.
In an email to BI, an Amazon spokesperson said the change in Alexa’s technology was part of a regular review process.
“We regularly evolve our software architecture to continuously improve Alexa for customers,” the spokesperson said. “That’s what’s happening — to suggest there’s a massive cost-cutting campaign is a gross exaggeration.”
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