Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by Chico75 » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 4:31 AM UTC

SkyPuncher wrote: post #52

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…

This has been my compliant with all of this voice control stuff. The dev teams are so damn focused on being able to answer some esoteric query that you're asking as joke, they forget that you only want to do like 5 basic things: * Set an alarm/reminder * Read then send a text message (while driving). It doesn't even have to be good. Just something that I can send while driving. * Maybe.....maybe ask for the weather.…

> * Play a song Thanks to their newest Amazon Music update, they managed to break this one by only allowing shuffling unless you pay extra for Amazon Music.

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

#102

Post by jonathankoren » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 4:31 AM UTC

OriginalPenguin wrote: post #70

MichaelCollins wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And that's why computers used in classified areas have their cameras and microphones physically disabled.

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

#103

Post by bombcar » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 4:32 AM UTC

xrd wrote: post #39

I've turned off all my Google Home devices. I hated that they were basically teaching my kids to memorize Google as an all knowing brand. Organized religions at least have a more charismatic idol than Sundar Pichai. Plus, my kids would basically fight over replaying the same song over and over again. And, of course, that's not even talking about the always-on surveillance aspect of it all. I have a Mycroft device tha…

I really want them to allow different names, I’d rename Siri to “Goddammmit” so fast.

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

#104

Post by MBCook » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 4:33 AM UTC

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…

Siri?

HomePods aren’t sold for a loss (Apple doesn’t do that, plus price makes it seem even less likely). Macs/iPhones/iPads/etc also pay for its development.

But it doesn’t exist to make money like Alexa (why would I buy random stuff with it?). It exists to make Apple devices more sticky. And it works well for what I use it for.

The Alexa business model never makes sense to me, and that’s even if the devices were never sold at a loss, which they frequently were.

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

#105

Post by putlake » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 4:34 AM UTC

thereisnospork wrote: post #81

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)

From what I've heard, AWS prices for large customers like Netflix are a lot lower than for Alexa or Amazon Retail. Netflix has the option to switch to GCP or Azure; Alexa doesn't so they don't get those discounts.

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

#106

Post by poxrud » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 4:34 AM UTC

29athrowaway wrote: post #80

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 use Alexa for everything. - To ask for the weather, weather alerts, relative humidity, precipitation, wind speed - To ask about outdoor air quality, indoor air quality (requires air quality monitors) - As a baby monitor (crying detector routine) - To know when to empty the dehumidifier bucket (humidity > 60% routine) - To know when someone left the AC fan off (high CO2 routine) - To know when to open the window (hi…

What do you use for VOC/PM detection that integrates with Alexa?

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

#107

Post by behringer » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 4:35 AM UTC

lsh123 wrote: post #88

slaw wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ;)

Creative journalism of creative accounting is more apt.

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

#108

Post by Eric_WVGG » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 4:39 AM UTC

29athrowaway wrote: post #80

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 use Alexa for everything. - To ask for the weather, weather alerts, relative humidity, precipitation, wind speed - To ask about outdoor air quality, indoor air quality (requires air quality monitors) - As a baby monitor (crying detector routine) - To know when to empty the dehumidifier bucket (humidity > 60% routine) - To know when someone left the AC fan off (high CO2 routine) - To know when to open the window (hi…

so from the perspective of an executive trying to make money off it: utterly useless

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

#109

Post by AlexandrB » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 4:39 AM UTC

putlake wrote: post #105

thereisnospork wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over billed from AWS to make that part of the balance sheet look good? (entirely speculation)

From what I've heard, AWS prices for large customers like Netflix are a lot lower than for Alexa or Amazon Retail. Netflix has the option to switch to GCP or Azure; Alexa doesn't so they don't get those discounts.

What does it mean for Alexa to "pay" for AWS though? Is it recorder as revenue somewhere or does it just get accounted for internally?

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

#110

Post by jijji » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 4:41 AM UTC

micah94 wrote: post #41

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 technolog…

At this point in the SOTA, Whisper [0], can probably be a drop in replacement for the for-profit Nuance versions of Dragon, etc. It's even open source.

[0] https://github.com/openai/whisper