Amazon's Alexa crash on Christmas Day could dampen the trend of gifting smart devices (AMZN)

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Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant suffered an outage in parts of Europe on Christmas Day, as new device owners attempted to activate their Echo smart speakers, according to The Guardian.

Gifting Is the Top Means of Smart Speaker Acquisition

The volume of voice requests from users activating and using their newly acquired devices overwhelmed Amazon’s servers and led to the device issuing error messages. While this isn’t a problem that Amazon is likely to deal with on an everyday basis, it could dampen further device adoption by leaving a poor taste in users’ mouths.

Amazon’s Echo smart speakers were a popular gift worldwide this holiday season. The devices headlined Amazon’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday sales with bundles and price cuts, and they were sold out on the e-commerce titan’s web portal and put on backorder around the world by early December.

This continued a trend that Business Insider Intelligence has been following for a few years now, with consumers — especially early adopters who have been using the AI-powered devices already — giving smart speakers as gifts. More than a quarter of respondents to Business Insider Intelligence’s Smart Speaker survey said they’d received their device as a gift, the most popular factor driving adoption.

If the recent outage leaves a poor impression, it could dampen this trend of gifting the devices. When trying to ask a question or give a command to Alexa, the device responded with an error message and stated that it was having trouble understanding the user.

That’s because voice commands are interpreted and responded to on the cloud rather than on the local device. So consumers weren’t able to use their new devices and get to know how they worked, while those who had already incorporated the smart speakers into their everyday lives — controlling lights, media, or security systems, for instance — were left unable to use the devices they rely on.

Given that a key driver of adoption is existing users giving the devices to friends and family, a bad experience among these users could hurt uptake.

Amazon’s already taken steps to forestall this sort of problem on its updated Echo Plus, announcing a new feature it calls “Local Voice Control,” which will allow consumers to control smart home devices even if the internet is out. But that feature is still limited in scope and in the speakers it works on.

Bringing at least limited Alexa functionality to more devices while they’re offline would help to limit the damage to reliability that an outage could bring about. Ensuring near-constant availability — especially during high-use periods — is critical to establishing smart speakers and AI voice assistants as integral parts of consumers’ day-to-day routines.

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