Here’s Why Alexa (and Siri and Google) Still Don’t Understand You as Well as They Should

Amazon Alexa, along with other voice assistants like Siri and the Google Assistant, don’t work as well as they should because early versions of their voice recognition technology were rushed to market, and then never improved. That’s according to Tigger (Charlie) Kindel, who worked at Amazon from 2013 to 2018, managing the development of Alexa’s voice capabilities.

If you have an Alexa (a.k.a. Amazon Echo)–or any other voice assistant–you know the kind of thing I mean. My shopping list has “cold pencil” on it because she couldn’t understand me when I said “kohl pencil”–my preferred form of eyeliner. The other day, my husband requested “instrumental jazz Christmas music” and she responded by playing folk music with vocals.

“The fundamentals are still broken,” Kindel said in a GeekWire interview. He’s now an adviser to startups in space exploration, but he’s also still an avid Alexa user and close follower of the industry. “They haven’t been able to focus on fixing a lot of the things that we built early on, that we knew were scaffolding, because we were moving really fast.”

Running up technical debt

It’s a common problem in the world of technology and a familiar conundrum for startup founders. You want to beat your competitors to market–Amazon’s team knew that Google was working on its own voice assistant–so you take as many shortcuts as necessary to get your product launched as quickly as you can. In Alexa’s case, the strategy worked. The first Amazon Echo device came out in late 2014, about 18 months before the Google Assistant first appeared. That gave Amazon a nice head start and quite a lot of market penetration before the first Google Home device became available.

But when you take shortcuts in software development in order to launch faster, you create what I.T. people call “technical debt”–the need to go back and replace that rapidly written software with something more stable and more scalable. As with financial debt, technical debt means that at some point in the future, you will likely have to forgo some new addition or improvement in order to pay what you owe.

According to Kindel, in Alexa’s case, the technical debt remains unpaid. “I left Amazon in 2018. And as far as I can tell, the fundamentals of how Alexa works have not gotten any better,” he told GeekWire. Instead of going back and fixing Alexa’s underpinnings, the company has continued rapidly expanding Alexa’s capabilities, adding new features, he said. “It’s a much broader ecosystem and a much broader set of capabilities and devices.”

Siri and the Google Assistant may have the same problem

And, he said, Alexa isn’t the only voice assistant facing this issue. “If you look at Google Assistant or Siri, they suffer from the same thing. I think it’s a fundamental technology thing.” The result, he said, is that none of these devices work quite as well as they should. “It’s still not a great experience for a lot of customers.”

Kindel says that rapidly building out Alexa was the right strategy for a time. But over the past couple of years, it’s saddled the Alexa team with some hefty problems, he said. “You’re not only trying to ship new features, but engineer and fix all the stuff and keep the lights on for all the stuff you’ve already launched. You’re in the throes of bringing on tons of new people constantly. And it just wears the organization down when it gets to that scale.”

And there could be even bigger problems on the horizon. Kindel says that with all the additions of new features, the Alexa team has never had the chance to go back and fix some the software’s underlying structure, which Kindel knew was not robust enough to sustain Alexa for the long term. “We were shipping prototypes,” he said. “And those prototypes are now the fundamentals of how Alexa works, and they’re fragile.”

There are two simple lessons here. First, if you’ve taken any shortcuts of your own in order to launch a new product or solve a problem quickly, make sure to go back and pay that technical debt. And if Alexa doesn’t always understand you or stops working altogether, now you know why.