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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

#61

Post by [deleted] »

lkrubner wrote: post #36
chevman wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But this is something that enterprise customers keep asking for. I think the "pain point" is well known: companies can easily spend $10 million or $20 million customizing their Salesforce implementation, but then the salespeople hate it and refuse to use it. And then, if you are the VP Of Sales, a lot of your job becomes an endless cycle of harassing your salespeople to record their interactions with customers. This…

[deleted]

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

#62

Post by [deleted] »

kennu wrote: post #33
cryptoz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they ‘detect’ the activation word without listening? Seems to me that is tautologically impossible. The definition of detect and listen are identical here. How do you detect sound waves without listening to them?

Amazon has a white paper on how it's supposed to work. According to the paper, yes, it's technically listening to audio, but storing it only in a temporary RAM buffer until it detects the wake word. I'm personally mostly interested in what gets recorded or sent to the cloud. "Echo devices use on-device keyword spotting designed to detect when a customer says the wake word. This technology inspects acoustic patterns i…

[deleted]

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

#63

Post by MichaelCollins »

kennu wrote: post #33
cryptoz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they ‘detect’ the activation word without listening? Seems to me that is tautologically impossible. The definition of detect and listen are identical here. How do you detect sound waves without listening to them?

Amazon has a white paper on how it's supposed to work. According to the paper, yes, it's technically listening to audio, but storing it only in a temporary RAM buffer until it detects the wake word. I'm personally mostly interested in what gets recorded or sent to the cloud. "Echo devices use on-device keyword spotting designed to detect when a customer says the wake word. This technology inspects acoustic patterns i…

They could easily push custom firmware to "persons of interest" (ever criticize your government?) and nobody would ever know.

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

#64

Post by rabuse »

nindalf wrote: post #54
somenameforme wrote: post #48

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 woul…

I think the Echo devices are included, so it means hardware sold. Not sure they were being sold at a profit. Also, you need to count the server costs, including machine learning training and inference.

Also, people are expensive, and it takes them to design and program this stuff.

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

#65

Post by rabuse »

mabbo wrote: post #29

What 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 Fulf…

Sounds like Google too.

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

#67

Post by alasdair_ »

thepasswordis wrote: post #28

I 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 th…

I suggest putting everything you can into home assistant and relying on that, since you host it yourself. It's also far more powerful than anything amazon provides anyway.

Then, the only integration you need is Alexa-> Home Assistant, so there is only one thing that can break.

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

#68

Post by OriginalPenguin »

nindalf wrote: post #54
somenameforme wrote: post #48

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 woul…

I think the Echo devices are included, so it means hardware sold. Not sure they were being sold at a profit. Also, you need to count the server costs, including machine learning training and inference.

For a while Amazon loved selling the smaller units for a little as a dollar (and often including several months of Amazon music for free or almost free as well).

Sell enough of these 30 dollar gadgets for a dollar and it will add up quickly.

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

#69

Post by [deleted] »

somenameforme wrote: post #48

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 woul…

[deleted]

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

#70

Post by OriginalPenguin »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #63
kennu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has a white paper on how it's supposed to work. According to the paper, yes, it's technically listening to audio, but storing it only in a temporary RAM buffer until it detects the wake word. I'm personally mostly interested in what gets recorded or sent to the cloud. "Echo devices use on-device keyword spotting designed to detect when a customer says the wake word. This technology inspects acoustic patterns i…

They could easily push custom firmware to "persons of interest" (ever criticize your government?) and nobody would ever know.

Yes. But that's also true of laptops, tablets, cell phones and lots of other items in our houses.
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