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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

#141

Post by SoftTalker »

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…

Medical dictation probably follows a pretty standardized pattern? Easier for the software to work well when it knows what to expect.

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

#143

Post by _vertigo »

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.

I work in Retail and I’m pretty sure this isn’t true. I don’t know what AWS charges Netflix but there is an internal rate card and I’m pretty sure it’s just based on what it costs to run the machines.

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

#144

Post by SoftTalker »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #59

I think in the future, products like Alexa will be simple products purchased once for a profit (not loss leaders) that do all the processing locally, not service subscriptions. I mean, do you really need an internet connection and "cloud" services to implement an egg timer you can talk to? Maybe they'll have an internet connection to check weather.gov, but that's about all that's really needed.

Why do you even need to talk to a timer? Why do you even need electricity? Timers can be built from gears and a spring.

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

#146

Post by dcow »

I don’t know if this is a general trend or just me, but Alexa hardly gets my music commands right anymore. I tell it to play music and almost always it insists on playing something similar sounding from the younger generation’s zeitgeist… like it thinks my tastes are too old and and thinks I should be listening to more popular songs. It’s a really bizarre experience recently. Alexa used to just work and play the music I expected. Now I have to specify things almost exactly, and even then sometimes it doesn't find the music I’m looking for. Is this what it feels like to get old?

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

#147

Post by Nursie »

mr_tristan wrote: post #112

After timers, the #1 use of Alexa in my house: 'make a fart noise'. We've tried to use Alexa for some games, like Jeopardy or Whose Line Is It Anyway, but it always is an incredibly buggy experience. Even just simple multiple choice games should work perfectly, and yet, a lot of the time even basic answers don't register, and the games themselves crash. I've always wondered - stupid mobile games are dominating video…

Not far off here -

1. cooking timers

2. fart noises

3. add X to my shopping list (used when shopping in a physical store)

4. Weather forecast

5. Turn off the tv

That's enough that I'm happy 'she' was built into our tv sound bar, but yeah, I don't think alexa is making any money from me.

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

#148

Post by atourgates »

bonniemuffin wrote: post #76

I rate my voice assistants by the quality of their "animal of the day"-- by this metric, Google Home is the clear winner. It's hard to even get Alexa to play you an animal sound, while Google has a really thoughtful Animal of the Day feature with sounds and animals facts. My toddler listens to the animal of the day at least once a day on it, comprising >50% of my overall voice assistant usage, and I love to hope that…

Alexa is popular with all my kids.

The toddlers love yelling at it and getting it to play songs they like. The older ones, well, I guess do the same thing but with different songs, and occasionally Wikipedia-style quick answers.

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

#149

Post by [deleted] »

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….

[deleted]

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

#150

Post by layer8 »

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…

Even if you know the specific prompts, it mishears you $percentage of the time.
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