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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

#231

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

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…

fwiw google understands "and" but you have to use full sentences on either side of the and because it processes them as independent queries. so what you wrote ought to work but "turn off office and living room lights" wouldn't

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

#232

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

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…

my dentist inputs my tooth readings via voice while she's operating on me. seems to work well for them

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

#233

Post by schnitzelstoat »

aborsy wrote: post #228
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 still buy from Amazon and almost never had issues. The delivery is max the following day, cheap, lots of variety, etc. It’s an open to all market, and there are certified channels and customers reviews. Big box stores dream to replicate that.

The customer reviews are hard to tell if they are genuine though.

I still like it, as sometimes you don't really care if you get some cheap knock-off good.

But for important stuff like my monitor, television etc. there's no way I would buy them from Amazon.

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

#234

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

ncallaway wrote: post #182
TulliusCicero wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see it as a replacement for UberEats if it could get to a high level of convenience. E.g. "Alexa, order two medium cheese pizzas from the closest Domino's for delivery." "Okay, ordering two medium cheese pizzas from a Domino's 2.7 miles away for delivery as soon as possible, for $25. Is that correct?" "Yes." "Okay, ordering pizzas. It'll take around 40 minutes." But you'd need a very high level of AI intellig…

Yea, I think there is a revenue stream there. I just question how big it is. First of all, you need to take a pretty-small slice of the transaction since they also need to make and deliver the pizza. If I know my Alexa order is always $1 more than calling it in myself... I'll probably just call. And then, there's a weird thing where this probably only works for the simplest (and then cheapest) transactions. If I'm pl…

don't forget promo codes. my papa johns always offers 25% off with code. that's like $15 on their ridiculous prices

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

#235

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #82

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.

metaverse can be profitable if he doesn't botch it tho. infinite room for ads. more $ if he pulls off the for business angle

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

#237

Post by bobsmooth »

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.

Can Alexa play music without a subscription? My Home Mini will play a radio station if I ask it for a specific band or genre without a sub to YouTube Music.

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

#238

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #86

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.

alexa understands "where's my shit" to mean "where are my Amazon packages" to my glee.

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

#239

Post by kube-system »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #209
b112 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Amazon used to be happy to price match themselves within a month or so of a purchase, or do things like let keep a cheap item you wanted to return. My guess is that they did some A/B testing and found that the "irrational" behavior actually saves them money. In your example, if 50% of people don't bother going through the return process they still come out ahead.

I bet this is actually it. I totally would ask for a price difference refund for a few bucks. But I’m not bothering with a return/repurchase for a couple dollars.

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

#240

Post by herghost »

I never really understood the use case, despite people I know wildly effusing the benefits.

I have a google smart speaker thing precisely because it's the only device that I can integrate with my Nest cameras and devices (which I bought before the Google acquisition). It does 2 things: 1) announce door bell ringing, and 2) play Apple Music in my office.

For everything else Siri, whilst demonstrably behind the curve of Amazon and Google, is perfectly functional - dictating short messages whilst walking, adding to a shared shopping list, setting timers.

I already have the phone for other reasons, there's no use case for buying an Alexa device that I can see.

I would never make a purchase from Amazon on an Alexa using my voice - there's simply too many variables that I can't control for. It might misunderstand (possibly catastrophically costing me a huge amount of money and inconvenience), the quality of goods on Amazon is too low and generally too variable to allow a an Amazon AI to be the arbiter of which product to buy for me, and even the manual purchase process changes too often and too subtly to have confidence that it won't add something that I don't want (i.e., a regular subscription to a product, pay on a credit arrangement, etc).

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