Link: The Alexa Skills revolution that wasn’t

The first Amazon Echo in 2014 primarily played music, answered questions, and provided weather updates. Despite Amazon's efforts to integrate more complex functionalities over the years, Alexa's primary uses remain largely unchanged.

Amazon adopted "skills" instead of an app store, aiming for developers to enhance Alexa's functionality. This approach required full integration across various services, a necessity for a successful assistant, unlike the isolated applications on smartphones.

In an ideal "ambient computing" world, Alexa would seamlessly access all necessary information to address user commands. These could range from finding weekend activities to booking travel or fetching updates on intricate topics like deep learning.

To date, there are over 160,000 Alexa skills available, a number dwarfed by smartphone app counts but significant nonetheless. However, user interface challenges persist, complicating the discovery and effective use of these skills.

Alexa's vision was to operate without needing a traditional app store, relying instead on voice commands to meet user needs. However, this has introduced challenges in privacy, choice, and ease of use, questioning the feasibility of a fully-integrated voice assistant.

Amazon plans to overhaul Alexa with Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve its understanding and interaction capabilities. This could eliminate the need for specific skill activation, aiming for a more intuitive user experience.

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