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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

#191

Post by mrtksn »

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 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 also why Siri is good enough even though it is destroyed in a trivia contest against Google or Amazon.

Voice UI is very bad since you don't have a way to know what it can do reliably. Treating it as general artificial intelligence doesn't work because the experience feels like trying to get a really stupid person do something for you. It's much easier to do it yourself than to find a sentence structure that works for this particular request but not for others.

Voice UI is only good for basic commands that you know the device is capable of.

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

#192

Post by system2 »

manv1 wrote: post #185
mradek wrote: post #13

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

You could say that about any piece of technology, including the Internet. I mean fuck, the internet is in your home! It's like letting every basement dwelling pervert peek into a keyhole in your basement!

You can control your computer's software but not Alexa's. The internet doesn't record your home via microphones and submit to FBI:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/14/amazon-echo-recordings-jud...

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

#193

Post by piva00 »

achow wrote: post #187
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…

2020 - It took Amazon four years to populate the world with 100 million Alexa-powered devices. It took the company just one more year to more than double that number. The e-commerce titan announced Monday that there are now "hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices" in customers' hands worldwide, a massive increase from the 100 million it announced last January. https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/amazon-sees-a…

Alexa-powered does not necessarily mean Alexa devices made by Amazon though.

For example: I own a multiroom speaker setup not made by Amazon that is Alexa-enabled, all speakers could run Alexa if I had set them up for it (which I won't, ever), and they're very likely counted on this metric. I can remember a multitude of other speakers and devices with an Alexa-enabled badge on their packaging that aren't made by Amazon.

It'd be good to have hardware figures for sales of Amazon's own devices.

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

#194

Post by lamontcg »

saghm wrote: post #132
SkyPuncher wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> Maybe.....maybe ask for the weather I remember one time I asked my Google Home the weather to see if it was cold enough to put on a jacket, and after hearing a temperature that I was ambivalent about, I took a risk and tried asking it what the wind speed was. It started reading out the Wikipedia page for "wind speed" until I told it to stop.

They all do stuff like that. It'd be really nice to have a button to turn that off entirely. I never want a device to literally read me long-form webpages. Stop trying to LARP as a Starship AGI when you aren't one.

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

#195

Post by heisenbit »

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…

The real problem with sales management systems are crossed incentives: The value of a sales person is their exclusive knowledge and contacts so nice voice interfaces to the knowledge vacuum hose are not going to make a change.

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

#196

Post by b112 »

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…

Perhaps a silly question, but can somebody describe how they might lose $10 billion on Alexa in one year?

Amazon seems to be a very poorly run company.

So many issues with search, with spam, with listings, and here's another data point...

Just bought a laptop. Waited until it was on sale, after doing Linux compatible research.

It shows up. 3 days later, it is even more on sale. This is a product sold and shipped by amazon.com, in both cases.

I contact support, and ask for a price drop refund, as there is a $150 price difference now. Nope, guy keeps linking me to "Price match" docs. I explain, I am not comparing vs another supplier, but amazon itself.

I am told, just return the laptop and order it again. That there is no other option.

For me, there is no return cost, other than a 5 minute detour to drop it off. Free return shipping.

For them, they lose the original shipping cost, the return cost, the processing of the return, and will sell it via amazon warehouse, for a $250 price drop.

I imagine that to sell a laptop via amazon warehouse, a check that it boots, a drive wipe is done, etc.

This is indicative of a company incapable of handling scale correctly.

Yet they blather on about loss on returns! And about return scams!

And yet, I still get the laptop at the price I want.

Only an insane person would act this way, and this insane act is a weird emegent behaviour at amazon.

It's telling, to me.

Amazon === borked

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

#197

Post by yalogin »

Did they try buying through Alexa? I can’t understand how they made that assumption. Every good i search on Amazon gives me a long list of items that I then have to sort, filter, parse, read the reviews, make sure it’s prime eligible, make sure it is not a fake etc. Had they even tried to fuss/ something it would have been obvious.

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

#198

Post by h4n1 »

Hellion wrote: post #172
adrr wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware is very expensive. Alexa dot is $14 on Amazon.com right now, i bet they are selling it at a loss for that price.

I bet that’s at cost tbh. You’d be surprised how cheap things have gotten. However, r&d and every single Alexa request costs money. So from day one, it’s losing money.

How much are two hundred million microphones in earshot of private conversations worth?

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

#199

Post by h4n1 »

MBCook wrote: post #133
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes wonder if companies have a plan or do things and it all just kinda falls into place. I used to make fun of Steam for the DRM part, but when combined with their Proton effort, OS and Deck all of a sudden all the crazy puzzle pieces fell into place, I started to wonder to what extent it pure chance vs conscious planning by Gabe. I agree with your point on integration. All the pieces seem to be there already…

I don’t know. Steam was DRM, but they smartly saw its ability to be a platform for selling everyone’s games. Proton/OS/deck all just seem like hedges against their constant enemy: Microsoft. That was always the existential threat to Steam, and MS made it official when they launched their store. It’s great it worked out, but I don’t think what we have today was in any of the early plans. I think most of it came later.…

Isn't Valve known for letting employees work on whatever they want? I'd imagine they already had a bone to pick with MS and wanted to be able to play games on Linux. Before that, things like the controller also seemed like "scratch your own itch" projects. They're good at making pieces that naturally fall into place.

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

#200

Post by RHSman2 »

h4n1 wrote: post #198
Hellion wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet that’s at cost tbh. You’d be surprised how cheap things have gotten. However, r&d and every single Alexa request costs money. So from day one, it’s losing money.

How much are two hundred million microphones in earshot of private conversations worth?

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