Jeff Bezos first sketched out the device that would become the Amazon Echo on a conference room whiteboard in early 2011. He wanted it to cost $20 and be controlled entirely by voice. Its brains would live in the cloud, exploiting the company’s Web Services offerings and allowing Amazon to constantly improve it without requiring owners to upgrade their hardware.
The first-ever depiction of a device with Alexa—the artificially intelligent virtual assistant that Bezos would name after the ancient library of Alexandria—showed the speaker, a microphone, and a mute button. It wouldn’t be able to understand commands right out of the box, so the sketch identified the act of configuring the device to a wireless network as a challenge requiring further thought.
Greg Hart, who was Bezos’ technical adviser, or “TA,” at the time, was the other person in the meeting, and he was listening closely. Bezos said he wanted Hart to lead the group that would turn this somewhat outlandish notion for a voice computer into an actual product. Hart snapped a photo of the drawing with his phone.
“Jeff, I don’t have any experience in hardware, and the largest software team I’ve led is only about 40 people,” he recalls saying.
“You’ll do fine,” Bezos replied.
Hart thanked him for the vote of confidence and said, “OK, well, remember that when we screw up along the way.”
For the next three years, Bezos would remain intimately involved in the project. He authorized the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars before the first Echo was ever released, made detailed product decisions, and met with the team as frequently as every other day. Using the German superlative, employees referred to him as the über product manager.
But it was Hart who ran the effort, just across the street from Bezos’ office, in a building that housed the team working on the Kindle. Over the next few months, Hart hired a small group from inside and outside the company. Like his boss, he was obsessed with secrecy. He sent out vague emails to prospective hires with the subject line “Join my mission” and asked interview questions like “How would you design a Kindle for the blind?” He declined to specify what product candidates would be working on. One interviewee recalls guessing that it was Amazon’s widely rumored smartphone and says that Hart replied, “There’s another team building a phone. But this is way more interesting.”
The initial Alexa crew worked with a feverish sense of urgency. Unrealistically, Bezos wanted to release the device in six to 12 months. He would have a good reason to hurry. On October 4, 2011, just as the Alexa team was coming together, Apple introduced the Siri virtual assistant in the iPhone 4S. It was the last passion project of cofounder Steve Jobs, who died of cancer the next day. Hart and his team felt validated by the news that a resurgent Apple was also working on a voice-activated personal assistant, but they were discouraged by the fact that Siri was first to market and initially garnered some negative reviews.
The Amazon team tried to reassure themselves that their product was unique, since it would be independent from smartphones. They were also attempting to pull off a much more technically complex feat. Siri’s users spoke commands directly into microphones. Amazon was trying to build a service capable of understanding language spoken from across a noisy room, using a relatively immature technology called far-field speech recognition.
To speed up development, Hart and his crew went looking for startups to acquire. It was a nontrivial challenge, since Nuance, the Boston-based speech giant whose technology Apple had licensed for Siri (and which was recently acquired by Microsoft), had grown over the years by gobbling up the top American speech companies. Alexa execs tried to learn which of the remaining startups were promising by asking prospective targets to voice-enable the Kindle digital book catalog, then studying their methods and results. The search led to several rapid-fire acquisitions over the next two years, including the Polish startup Ivona.