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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

#271

Post by rg111 »

vishnugupta wrote: post #171

I'll add little bit of context from Kindle Reader which was developed while I was at Amazon. Though I was in no way involved with it I frequently interacted with senior folks who were. For first few years, Kindle Reader was a massive sink hole at multiple levels. There was this humongous R&D cost, hardware and software. On a recurring basis Amazon absorbed cellular data charges. Remember this was in early 2008 so cel…

These two are fundamentally different. Books always existed. They are a concrete, well-defined, well-understood, ubiquitous object.

You just wanted to sell a new way towards it.

But audio-things aren't even properly defined.

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

#272

Post by sokoloff »

bobsmooth wrote: post #237
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.

Yes. It’s probably the most common usage for Alexa devices in our house. Kitchen timers and weather being the other common ones.

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

#273

Post by datpiff »

cryptoz wrote: post #12
kennu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, did you actually verify that "it's listening all the time to what goes on"? The Echo devices are supposed to only turn on full power and start listening when they detect the activation word ("Alexa" by default).

How do they ‘detect’ the activation word without listening? Seems to me that is tautologically impossible. The definition of detect and listen are identical here. How do you detect sound waves without listening to them?

Usually a triage system. A low-power voice detection might run on the unit itself, capable of detecting speech but not recognizing it. Another NN might be running on the device itself that can only categorize the activation words. Finally they wake the network interface and send all the data off to Amazon for a datacentre to run the inference.

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

#274

Post by scott_w »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #116
AlexandrB wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Probably means Alexa loses $10 billion instead of $9.5 or whatever and has to fire some more people

MMAesawy gave the correct answer. It makes it clear what Alexa is really costing Amazon in an format that's easy to interpret. This is how most companies handle "internal purchases" from another business unit that also sells that product externally.

Consider it this way: if Alexa doesn't buy that capacity, someone else could, so it's important to capture this opportunity cost.

It's not perfect, however. I've seen examples where the repairs division of a company had to buy parts from its distribution branch at retail price. All well and good, so far. Except they then had to mark-up that part's price in the repair cost. Combine that with the fact distribution would give discounted rates to other repair companies to secure business and what you have is a repair division that's being outbid on price by competitors using the same parts!

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

#275

Post by projektfu »

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.

Alexa, what's the wind like today?

Worked for me

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

#276

Post by chimprich »

ikt wrote: post #37
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 really wish there was an easy way to just put python scripts onto the device or something. Doesn't https://mycroft.ai fit this purpose? Looks like you can ssh in: https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/mark-ii/advanced/ssh-access and has python running on it: https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/skill-development/introdu... Has anyone got one though?

We really need free versions of virtual assistants, but Mycroft doesn't seem to be getting there.

It seems to be $350 (no international pricing?) which seems far too high to be realistic. More subjectively, that's quite an ugly-looking unit.

Also, not shipping till Jan? I'd be interested to see a review if anyone has managed to get one.

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

#277

Post by steveBK123 »

End of ZIRP might not just kill off the perma-loss long startup model, but also some of the long running loss making divisions.

I was also struck yesterday by news that Disney loses a run rate of $6B annually on streaming with nearly 250M customers.

So they are losing ~$24/customer per year, selling a service at $8/month. It's interesting how all the competing streaming services popped up around $8/month that forced Netflix to offer lower priced tiers from their $12/15/20 range, but arguably that was actually the natural, profit-making price.

It's not a customer acquisition cost if you continue to lose it every month.

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

#278

Post by philjohn »

UltraViolence wrote: post #268

Besides not being monetizable I refuse to have some spy microphone in my home which sends all my conversations to Amazon Central. The market penetration is therefore finite, limited to geeks and early adopters. I'm somewhat surprised they didn't consider profitability more thoroughly when they started with Alexa. It must have cost them $100 billion by now.

I think you're assuming you are part of the majority - you're not.

"Something that makes my life easier! Cool!"

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

#279

Post by michaelt »

sokoloff wrote: post #265
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.

It’s got to be at least $5-7 to take my payment, pick, pack, and deliver it.

I can get a wifi-enabled microcontroller delivered from China for $3.40 [1] including payment, picking, packing and delivery. And the product is at least $1 of that price.

I find it hard to believe Amazon is spending more than $2 on payment and delivery.

[1] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004563128378.html

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

#280

Post by ben174 »

piva00 wrote: post #193
achow wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Amaz…

Assuming you're referring to Sonos -- while they were once the best, they seem to just not work well anymore. I'm lucky if I can get it to function correctly. I've observed my brother's Chromecast whole-home audio which cost him a fraction of the price and has a ton more variety - and I'm thinking I may ditch my Sonos setup.
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