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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

#311

Post by chevman »

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…

Yeah, this is a classic 'nice to have' solution - it's a pain point in the process and so you hear feedback and requests for solutions.

But the real question to determine if it's a viable product/business is does it drive enough value that people will actually buy it, use it, and remain paying customers?

I'd say in your example above, it likely won't massively decrease costs (the salespeople are still having to interact with a CRM) or drive increased incremental revenue in any real way.

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

#313

Post by andrepd »

mcphage wrote: post #289
consp wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice numbers but don't those Alexa enabled device bring in revenue offsetting the cost and limiting the loss? Or doesn't anyone have an Amazon premium account or buy anything with Alexa on Amazon?

We have I think… 5? Echo devices in my house, including an echo dot Amazon just sold me for $1 because it was my “Primeaversary". I haven’t purchased a single thing through them.

Very curious why you would wiretap your home with 5 always-on internet-connected speakers running opaque software for a tech giant.

I dunno, it's the sort of thing that would be fit for a robocop-like dystopia just a couple decades ago but is seemingly... "normal" now.

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

#314

Post by ndiddy »

consp wrote: post #213
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…

Nice numbers but don't those Alexa enabled device bring in revenue offsetting the cost and limiting the loss? Or doesn't anyone have an Amazon premium account or buy anything with Alexa on Amazon?

From the article you’re commenting on:

One internal document described the business model by saying, "We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices."

That plan never really materialized, though. It's not like Alexa plays ad breaks after you use it, so the hope was that people would buy things on Amazon via their voice. Not many people want to trust an AI with spending their money or buying an item without seeing a picture or reading reviews. The report says that by year four of the Alexa experiment, "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.

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

#315

Post by UltraViolence »

philjohn wrote: post #278
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!"

In my entire life I've only met a handful of people who had a "Smart Speaker" (Alexa, Google Assistant or HomePod).

People don't see any value in it. And some technically inclined acquaintance will probably point out that the thing records everything they say and sends it to Amazon.

The only thing that mildly makes sense is something like an offline version that controls the lights, heating etc.

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

#316

Post by tiahura »

andrepd wrote: post #313
mcphage wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have I think… 5? Echo devices in my house, including an echo dot Amazon just sold me for $1 because it was my “Primeaversary". I haven’t purchased a single thing through them.

Very curious why you would wiretap your home with 5 always-on internet-connected speakers running opaque software for a tech giant. I dunno, it's the sort of thing that would be fit for a robocop-like dystopia just a couple decades ago but is seemingly... "normal" now.

Because they're convenient. In my house, you'll hear - Alexa, when is the Bills game? Alexa, when is daylight savings. Alexa, play Christmas music. Alexa, what is the etymology of wanker? Alexa, is Chipotle still open? Alexa, how old is Patrick Maholmes? Alexa, what time is it in Kenya? Alexa, ad nauseum.

If Amazon wants to datamine the dickens out of that to sell me more socks and USB cables, I really don't care.

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

#317

Post by mFixman »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #52
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…

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.…

To me, the use case of Alexa is doing those exact same things _without_ having to use my phone.

Sometimes I want to listen to a podcast without risking accidentally spending the next hour on Reddit.

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

#318

Post by russfink »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #52
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…

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.…

I believe that we are conditioned to restrict our command set based on what we know the device can do.

This betrays a spectacular failure of imagination on improving what the system can do. Show me a weather map. Show me turn by turn directions. Show me the television schedule. These are simple things that the display version cannot do.

Another problem is the clunkiness of accessing the apps. Ask foobar to tell me a joke … why not just “tell me a joke,” and remember that foobar is the preferred app to handle it? I have to remember two things. I have to remember that foobar is the app that I want, and tell me a joke is the command I must give to it.

Finally, volume control. When I ask it to turn it up, it stupidly increments it by one notch. Instead, it should take a sample of ambient noise, and pick a setting that is slightly above that. Otherwise, why would I be asking it to turn it up?

Just really simple simple things. I bet they could take 10 very smart people, that have never used this in the first place, and just watch them while they imagine all the possible things that could help around the house.

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

#319

Post by tiahura »

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?

Apparently -$10,000,000,000.00.

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

#320

Post by russfink »

Nursie wrote: post #147
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.

When we first got ours years ago, I tried a bunch of apps. In a very short time, I became frustrated with the apps, and therefore adjusted my expectations of the device. Now, all I use it for is playing songs, adding items to the shopping list, printing the shopping list, asking where my orders are, playing the morning briefing, and occasionally asking it to solve a small computation.

I think that everyone on here, that is like you and me, is that way because we have trimmed down our expectations over time due to poor implementation.

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