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Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

arstechnica.com

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Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#41

Post by micah94 »

LASR wrote: post #15

Are 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…

A customer of mine has a product based on DragonNaturallySpeaking that medical doctors use for dictation. They are doing a brisk business. It's all software. No fancy hardware. For this use case, it's almost flawless. And way faster than typing. The only commands you give are related to the recording -- stop/start/playback-type commands. Not sure how sophisticated it gets beyond that. But the speech-to-text technology is pretty damn good now.

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#42

Post by danielodievich »

mradek wrote: post #13

Still boggles my mind that people willingly put these kinds of devices in their homes.

I absolutely concur. I think these are the creepiest pieces of spying one can have. I've never seen one do anything useful. I don't mind walking to my radio to play music and I like using my computer with keyboard and mouse to buy amazon stuff.

Plus everyone's mobile device is already this anyhow.

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#44

Post by enumjorge »

> Not many people want to trust an AI with spending their money or buying an item without seeing a picture or reading reviews.

I wonder how much the decline in quality of Amazon's marketplace has affected other parts of the company's business including Alexa. I remember a time when, if I wanted to buy something online, I'd just buy off Amazon without shopping around. They almost always had the best price, their shipping was fast, and I trusted the quality of what I received. In that world, I could see myself saying my shopping list out lout to an Echo to make things easier.

But in Amazon's current free-for-all marketplace, I would never do that. Now I typically check traditional big box stores first, and only go with Amazon if I can't find what I need elsewhere.

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#47

Post by mr_toad »

fatneckbeardz wrote: post #10
paulpauper wrote: post #2

so it's not just the metaverse that is bleeding money

without AWS Amazon would be losing money not making a profit. its been around the financial / wsb reddit and twitter lately.

It’s a low margin business, and Amazon have focused on growth over margins.

The popular perception that Amazon rakes in massive profits is some sort of folk wisdom.

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#48

Post by somenameforme »

Perhaps a silly question, but can somebody describe how they might lose $10 billion on Alexa in one year? I don't understand the math. That's enough to pay 33,000 employees $330k a year, or some recombination of such. I don't think the real numbers come even remotely close to that.

So it presumably has to be hardware costs, but Alexa is software, and they have vertical integration of all servers which presumably would drive voice processing costs to negligible levels as well (and that's assuming 0 on-device caching/learning ability). And this is all assuming that the gross revenue generated by Alexa is $0, which also certainly isn't true. So I don't see where the numbers are coming from?

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#49

Post by grepfru_it »

enumjorge wrote: post #44

> Not many people want to trust an AI with spending their money or buying an item without seeing a picture or reading reviews. I wonder how much the decline in quality of Amazon's marketplace has affected other parts of the company's business including Alexa. I remember a time when, if I wanted to buy something online, I'd just buy off Amazon without shopping around. They almost always had the best price, their shipp…

I actually started sorting price from low to high and have found the real price that way. It's interesting to see promoted items $5-10 higher than a similar product thrown randomly in the list
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