Amazon’s Alexa debuts Answer Updates to respond later to questions it can’t answer immediately | Tech Industry

Amazon is introducing a feature today designed to return to you with the right answer when Alexa fails to answer your question. Answer Updates will be rolled out to Alexa-enabled devices over the course of the coming week, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.

Say “Alexa, turn on Answer Update” to receive alerts and Alexa will say “If you ask me a question and I don't know the answer but find out later I'll notify you.” Say “Alexa, turn off Answer Update” to stop receiving updates to factual questions the AI assistant was unable to answer.

Amazon's draws Alexa's answers to questions from knowledge bases like Wikipedia.

The results of a 800 question-and-answer test released late last month by Loup Ventures found that Google Assistant is the best AI assistant available for answering questions followed by Siri, Alexa, and Cortana.

By specific category, Alexa ranked second in general information questions, answering 78 percent of questions answered, and third in commerce with 44 percent of questions answered correctly.

Amazon is still considered by most to be the best-selling smart speaker around, but surveys in January and again in May found Home speakers gaining in market share versus Amazon's Echo line of speakers.

Answer Updates could also be about giving users more assurance that the assistant is making changes and steady strides to improve or manage expectations, since people can often presume AI assistants can answer every single question they can imagine like Computer from Star Trek.

A PricewaterhouseCoopers survey and study released in April found that at 59 percent answering in the affirmative, ask a quick question was the most common thing for consumers to do with their voice on a monthly basis.

Though smart speakers continue to be considered the most popular consumer electronic today and AI assistant adoption is expected to increase in the years ahead, a lack of consistently could get in the way of wider adoption rates of voice computing, as 73 percent of survey respondents said they need correct answers to use an AI assistant on a regular basis.