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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

#251

Post by thorncorona »

hateful wrote: post #154
dcow wrote: post #146

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 musi…

This is because you are the product, not the customer. The customer is the record company paying to get their artists music into your ears. I've waited my whole life for AI assistants. I remember being really excited about the promise in the 90s. But it's this is it? Voluntary advertisement consumption? Very disappointing.

Hanlon's Razor -- maybe Alexa matches to the most probable match and not many people are expecting what OP expects Alexa to play?

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

#252

Post by lotsofpulp »

menshiki wrote: post #223
tppiotrowski wrote: post #222

Privacy considerations aside, I switched from Alexa to Google Home Assistant because Google is a search/ML company and best poised to understand a question and provide relevant context (like Google search result snippets). Search is not Amazon's or Apple's main business so they will have a hard time competing. (last I checked, Siri just does a Google search and provides links when it doesn't understand a question) Ho…

I think HomePods are very different devices compared to what both Amazon and Google make. Even the HomePod mini sounds way better than anything competitors make. Many are willing to pay premium for the superior sound quality. Apple simply plays a different game. Not the one where it would have to compete with $10 echo devices.

Yes, Siri is hot garbage too, but I find HomePods worth it just for the sound quality. Especially worth it in stereo mode paired with an Apple TV in the room.

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

#253

Post by doliveira »

dcow wrote: post #146

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 musi…

That's very similar to YouTube recommendations, they seem to think your tastes are too peculiar and you should be dragged down to a more popular cluster.

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

#254

Post by lotsofpulp »

fbdab103 wrote: post #165
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.

I want to subscribe to your future. Everyday I see more and more devices insist they require the Internet. Washing machines, TVs, thermostats. Seemingly the market for offline devices is limited. MBAs need that recurring revenue.

Can you link a single washing machine, TV, or thermostat that requires the internet? I have never seen one.

Even my ecobee thermostat does not require an internet connection.

https://support.ecobee.com/s/articles/Wi-Fi-FAQ-Setup-Guide-...

> The short answer is yes.

>Even without a Wi-Fi connection, your ecobee will still function as a traditional thermostat; it will engage your equipment as needed and maintain your comfort set points.

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

#256

Post by wikfwikf »

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.

My guess is that they also might do market segmentation analysis to understand what type of customer you are, and this affects the return policy.

For example, you consistently buy small ticket household items and rarely return anything: when you do return something they will be helpful and generous to keep you happy.

You buy large amounts of fairly expensive clothes and shoes but return around 50% after trying on. They will accept the returns without issues but won't let you keep anything.

You're a bargain hunter who buys expensive laptops or hard drives whenever the discounts look really good. They will make returning stuff a little harder for you since they know you don't have loyalty, and they don't want to facilitate arbitrage.

Doing this is computationally no more sophisticated than the work they are already doing to detect professional scammers. They aren't supposed to show different customers different prices, but they can freely use things like this to do stealth price differentiation, since many details of how the return policy is implemented are at their discretion.

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

#257

Post by wikfwikf »

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 seems interesting to me about many of these (all the HVAC, home automation stuff) is that a device with a voice interface sort of seems like a local maximum in terms of usability. You're spending lots of time getting info from Alexa and then telling her what to change to keep the environment ambient.

I would expect that in the future, home automation does all the regulation for you without any interaction. You set up a bunch of configuration in advance, and maybe train the device a little bit initially on things like your temperature preferences (because we think we want a certain temp, but actually usually find it slightly too warm or whatever). Then you almost never have to make changes, let alone expend your executive function on deciding what instructions to give the devices.

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

#258

Post by c7b »

rahoulb wrote: post #245
c7b wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says that the hardware was generally sold at cost, though.

Doesn't that mean cost of materials/COGS though? Which doesn't include the overheads (engineering and staff, development and maintenance of back-end services, legal and compliance and all the rest) that you would normally plan to cover with the gross profit on the device.

It's a good question what exactly they meant by 'at cost', but it's at least going to be the plain hardware cost (plus maybe shipping), I suppose. And the point of the parent and GP was that the overheads shouldn't be that significant either, so it is still a bit of a mystery where exactly they spent that much money.

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

#259

Post by deafpolygon »

Alexa's value is not in the device itself, but the fact that said product (Alexa, and Alexa-powered, et. al.) is in over 100 million homes. The value is in mining that data at some point in the future.

Amazon is familiar with employing that strategy, and it hopes to make it pay off again.

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

#260

Post by pflenker »

We're heavy Alexa users. Since we are a family, the #1 use case is of course farting noises, but other than that, we use it to: - Set ourselves reminders - Manage the family calendar (reading out of reminders, reading the calendar, scheduling and rescheduling events) - Manage the family todo list - Manage the shopping list - Read out weather information including rain, to help us decide on what to wear outside - Some of my kids can't read yet, for them it's easy to use Alexa to start their own favorite audiobooks - Games - Answering trivia and animal noises - Manage the temperature in all the rooms of our house

I also heavily use a routine that reads out the weather forecast, upcoming appointments and the latest news.

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