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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

#81

Post by thereisnospork »

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…

Over billed from AWS to make that part of the balance sheet look good?

(entirely speculation)

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

#82

Post by benjaminwootton »

It must be the only piece of hardware where people buy 5+ of them too. It makes me think some of the loss is on per unit sales.

They also own a “platform” in the way that Zuck is trying to do with Metaverse at much greater cost.

All things considered, I don’t think it’s been such a bad investment and I don’t see it being killed.

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

#83

Post by benjaminwootton »

alasdair_ wrote: post #67
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.

What is Home Assistant? Google doesn’t help….

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

#84

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

grepfru_it wrote: post #49
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

I've been trying to do that, but as soon as i sort, there is a whole bunch of unrelated stuff for pages... How do you address that?

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

#85

Post by subpixel »

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…

This. Alexa is a trust-interface. Many consumers don’t trust Amazon anymore, so they sure as hell won’t trust some bot to spend their money for them there.

I just decided not to buy an item from Amazon despite it being cheaper, because I need it and I don’t have time to deal with it being a model from a previous year or whatever the catch may be.

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

#86

Post by devoutsalsa »

I won’t buy a taking wire tap again until they unlock profanity mode. I seriously want it to say “The next fucking movie time is 10 o’ god damn clock. You want the tickets or not bitch?” That would entertain me so damn much. Instead I get this sterile interaction that is ok-not-great and I can’t get the device to drop even one eff bomb. Lame.

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

#87

Post by prawn »

bigtunacan wrote: post #22

From 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.

Giving away smart speakers that are used almost entirely to queue up music from an Amazon music subscription might've been their best approach. Would've differentiated a bit from Spotify and Apple Music. We use ours only to set cooking timers and play things on Spotify, and that's useful enough IMO.

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

#88

Post by lsh123 »

slaw wrote: post #60
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…

> This year, an employee familiar with the hardware team said, the company is on pace to lose about $10 billion on Alexa and other devices. Creative journalism or creative accounting.

Or both ;)

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

#89

Post by jonahhorowitz »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #83
alasdair_ wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is Home Assistant? Google doesn’t help….

https://www.home-assistant.io/
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