I think its great! It’s my alarm and does all the lights. Tells me jokes and the weather.. What more would I use it for?
Its jokes are dumb and boring. Amazon can’t afford to put funny jokes on it.
Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
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Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#22From the article,
"Alexa was getting a billion interactions a week, but most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather. Those questions aren't monetizable."
This is mostly how I use Alexa, but those requests to play music are backed by an annual Amazon Music Unlimited subscription that I wouldn't bother with if I didn't have Alexas throughout the house.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#23My echo absolutely became less accurate month after month. Simple commands like “turn off the lights” would be 50/50. Very low-value technology and it certainly gives one pause about the feasibility of AI when something so basic with so much capital and years of effort is still fairly poor.
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Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#24Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#25This is wonderful news. My gf has one in her living room. It is only used to play music, set a timer (usually watch is used) and adding things to a (third party) grocery list. Plus it's listening all the time to what goes on. I had one alexa device: a scanner that would read a barcode and add it to a shopping list (or you could talk to it -- ugh, had to keep it in a drawer). It was handy as I ran out of milk to just…
I'm curious, did you actually verify that "it's listening all the time to what goes on"? The Echo devices are supposed to only turn on full power and start listening when they detect the activation word ("Alexa" by default).
They tell you that they will sometimes listen when they don't hear the wake word (or hear a near miss) and report back home what they heard. It's closer to "listening all the time" than I am comfortable with.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#26Are any voice assistants making any money? The problem with voice assistants at the moment is the same as command line tools. You have to know what specific prompts work and don’t work etc. I often see my parents make simple queries like “turn off the white lights and turn on the night lights” only to get the response that it can only do one thing at a time. There will be a future where this gets more and more sophis…
Even if it were more sophisticated, I don't really see how it makes money. Even if it could absolutely nail that slightly more complicated command, and manage your home automation with natural language processing... that doesn't make money either!
I agree completely with your assessment, that they behave more like a verbal CLI than a proper assistant, but solving that well doesn't seem like it offers a great opportunity for monetization.
My hope is that the open source voice assistants get more popular, and it gets easier to flash the Amazon Echo to be a satellite device for the open source voice assistant. I've looked at running the open source voice assistants locally, but the biggest barrier I had was the cost for each of the microphone/speakers. Amazon's really got the cost of those things way way down.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#27I think its great! It’s my alarm and does all the lights. Tells me jokes and the weather.. What more would I use it for?
> What more would I use it for?
Well... Amazon would want you to do something with it that makes them money.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#28I use my Alexa all the time, but 99% of it is:
Alexa, time! Alexa, set an alarm for 5 minutes! Alexa how many minutes left? Alexa, turn off/on all the lights!
That’s basically it. I wrote some apps for it a long time ago to do custom stuff like read me some Reddit pages, but the SDK changed or something and eventually they just died and it wasn’t obvious to me how to recreate it/not worth the effort. I really wish there was an easy way to just put python scripts onto the device or something. The process of going through Amazon is pretty unnecessarily complex and annoying.
I know there are ways of doing this stuff with raspberry pi, but also: not really worth the effort. If I cared that much I’d just make a PWA for my house and give that to my wife and kids.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#29What bothers me isn't just the wasted money and time. It's the opportunity cost of all of those devs not working on other stuff.
Alexa pulled talent from everywhere throughout Amazon. It took up a huge portion of the hiring funnel for new devs. All of those people could have been doing useful, money-making, cost-cutting things instead.
I can think of at least a dozen really brilliant devs I worked with in Amazon Fulfillment who left to go work for Alexa. They'd tell me what their team/group/org did and I'd ask "but how does that make money?" and they'd laugh. "Yeah, last year I heard we had less than a million in revenue, but hey, they're certain it'll become big somehow".
What a waste of talent.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#30Having worked at startups that wanted to take Alexa into the enterprise space, I'll say that Amazon has been absolutely opposed to the idea, which feels like a missed opportunity. Up to a point, I can admire the product discipline that Amazon and Apple (Alexa and Siri) have shown in keeping their voice products focused on consumers. But after so many years, when do we finally get voice for the enterprise? At one time…
Generally in BigCo land you need a value prop that will allow your buyer to do 1 or 2 things (or a combo) - take out massive cost, or drive large incremental revenue.
Most of the voice solutions I've seen kind of nibble around the edges of this, don't get traction, and slowly die a slow death somewhere deep in the middle of the RFP or evaluation process.