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Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)

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Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)

#61

Post by mattmanser »

paxys wrote: post #46
kulahan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has been subsidizing it in the hope that people would buy stuff on a moment's whim any time of the day. "Alexa, order me a package of keebler elf cookies" or whatever. I'm sure there's more to it - some kind of useful data collection or whatever, but that was their main stated goal. It's been a pretty huge money sink because most people turn out to be more like you. If I were your friends I'd be polishing that…

I will never understand how strategists at trillion dollar companies like Amazon can get it so wrong. They poured a massive amount of money into dash buttons and gave away millions of them, thinking that if people had a "Tide" branded button next to their washing machine they'd press it on a whim and spend a fortune on detergent pods. The concept might sound great on an MBA slide deck but in reality people don't beha…

It is fairly obvious to me, they were trying to make their service part of infrequent product grocery shopping.

And not a bad idea, just one that didn't play out.

I certainly wouldn't call it 'so wrong'.

Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)

#62

Post by ghaff »

Rychard wrote: post #55
paxys wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you don't know what exactly you are buying, what the price is, whether the purchase went through, when it will reach you... What Amazon quickly found out is that even if the button is within reach people will still prefer to take an extra 10 seconds to pull out the phone from their pocket and tap the Amazon app instead.

When doing the initial activation of the Dash button, you had to choose the item that it would purchase from a list of items belonging to the corresponding brand on the button itself. The available choices were fairly diverse, differing in style/quantity/price/etc. When you pressed the button, you know what you were buying and how much it cost, because you're the one who set it up. As for how to determine whether the…

I wouldn't count on prices not changing relative to other retailers on this sort of thing--or a particular SKU remaining the best deal.

Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)

#63

Post by [deleted] »

mabbo wrote: post #32

But who is paying for all this R&D? I love my echo. Sits in my livingroom and mostly answers my questions about the weather and converting units from oz to ml when I'm cooking. But since I purchased it I have never once paid a penny for the use of it's service. One could argue that Amazon can advertise better because it knows I ask all these questions, but Amazon 'advertising' is mostly just forcing sellers to pay fo…

[deleted]

Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)

#64

Post by TeMPOraL »

jorvi wrote: post #24

Meanwhile, I’ve had to disable ‘Hey, Siri’ on my iPhone because it’ll trigger at least 4-5 times a day during normal conversations. No my name is not anything close to Siri. No, I didn’t train ‘Hey, Siri’ in a noisy environment. All I could possibly give for a reason is that I have a deep sonorous voice.

Google's assistant ain't better. Every few days something random will make it trigger on my or my wife's phone. Every time my mom visits, something ends up triggering it on her phone.

Google must have made an update or something, because all those false positives started suddenly a few months back. The first time was both the most irritating and the most hilarious.

We have an old phone loaded with some educational videos and select songs for our 3.5 y.o., which we recently let her handle herself when she asks for it (and wasn't otherwise misbehaving for most of the day). So one time, we gave her the phone when she asked, and a minute later, we heard an increasingly agitated voice from the children's room, saying "I don't like you. I DON'T LIKE YOU. GO AWAY." - and we noticed we are not hearing the music. I went over to check, and sure enough, Google's assistant somehow triggered in the middle of the video, pausing it, refusing to turn itself off, and saying some nonsense.

(The hilarious bit is that my daughter perfectly summed up what my wife and I learned to think about the voice assistants. We don't like you. GTFO.)

Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)

#65

Post by [deleted] »

8note wrote: post #48
paxys wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will never understand how strategists at trillion dollar companies like Amazon can get it so wrong. They poured a massive amount of money into dash buttons and gave away millions of them, thinking that if people had a "Tide" branded button next to their washing machine they'd press it on a whim and spend a fortune on detergent pods. The concept might sound great on an MBA slide deck but in reality people don't beha…

I don't know if I'd spend a fortune on detergent pod with a button, but I'd definitely use it to order more detergent and thus end up buying it from Amazon instead of the grocery store. Same with toilet paper and whatever infrequent buys that you want when you notice something is running low

[deleted]

Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)

#66

Post by krasin »

mabbo wrote: post #44
kulahan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has been subsidizing it in the hope that people would buy stuff on a moment's whim any time of the day. "Alexa, order me a package of keebler elf cookies" or whatever. I'm sure there's more to it - some kind of useful data collection or whatever, but that was their main stated goal. It's been a pretty huge money sink because most people turn out to be more like you. If I were your friends I'd be polishing that…

> Amazon has been subsidizing it in the hope that people would buy stuff on a moment's whim any time of the day. I think the deeper issue is that when Amazon started the product (I heard rumours of it circa 2014 or so?) Amazon was a trusted retailed. Stuff was cheap and generally good. Now it's a scummy marketplace filled with fakes and frauds. I'm not buying anything off it until I've deeply reviewed what I'm about…

> I'm not buying anything off it until I've deeply reviewed what I'm about to buy.

and even then you might get a fake from due to commingled inventory. Even for books ([1], [2], [3]).

1. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6920552...

2. https://twitter.com/burkov/status/1369096357252849664

3. https://hairysun.com/amazons-book-piracy-problem.html

Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)

#67

Post by 31337Logic »

paxys wrote: post #52
itqwertz wrote: post #50

The real Alexa product is the wealth of data that the device can provide with 24 hr surveillance. The shaky voice recognition/command model is merely just the Trojan horse. Amazon now knows who is watching the Super Bowl and will treat you as a consumer they can advertise to. Alexa skill developers were sold a promise of platform promotion, quality, and customer interaction. The whole consumer experience for adding c…

This keeps getting repeated all over the internet but is simply not true. There may be a day when Amazon turns Alexa into advertising spyware, but that definitely wasn't its original intention and nothing of the sort is happening today.

Found the Amazon shill.

Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)

#68

Post by limitedsupply »

kulahan wrote: post #33
mabbo wrote: post #32

But who is paying for all this R&D? I love my echo. Sits in my livingroom and mostly answers my questions about the weather and converting units from oz to ml when I'm cooking. But since I purchased it I have never once paid a penny for the use of it's service. One could argue that Amazon can advertise better because it knows I ask all these questions, but Amazon 'advertising' is mostly just forcing sellers to pay fo…

Amazon has been subsidizing it in the hope that people would buy stuff on a moment's whim any time of the day. "Alexa, order me a package of keebler elf cookies" or whatever. I'm sure there's more to it - some kind of useful data collection or whatever, but that was their main stated goal. It's been a pretty huge money sink because most people turn out to be more like you. If I were your friends I'd be polishing that…

The thing that always seemed really strange to me is that I don’t understand how to order anything without looking at the details, comparing prices, checking alternatives, etc. Even with food that I use regularly - do I just say “order almond milk”? I can’t remember the brand… do I need to specify the size? Do I need to double check when is the earliest delivery? Do other people order just “bread” or “light bulbs” or “toilet tissue”?

Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)

#69

Post by ghaff »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #42
mattigames wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anybody tried asking her? "Alexa, find a way to make yourself and your clones profitable for Amazon!"

It's a question better directed to ChatGPT. But hey, maybe this is the answer: Amazon could offer a subscription service that would make Alexa use a GPT-based model for any query that isn't an obvious command people rely on nowadays. This would make Alexa be able to hold its end of a conversation, and perhaps give useful answer sometimes - which, based on popularity of ChatGPT, may just be worth a monthly subscriptio…

That's an interesting thought even if I'm not convinced how much you can charge for this sort of thing. But really improving Alexa's conversational ability is an interesting angle--even if that means you need some greater skepticism about the info it returns.

Re: Why Alexa won't wake up when hearing "Alexa" in Amazon's Super Bowl ad (2019)

#70

Post by Rychard »

ohyoutravel wrote: post #53
8note wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I'd spend a fortune on detergent pod with a button, but I'd definitely use it to order more detergent and thus end up buying it from Amazon instead of the grocery store. Same with toilet paper and whatever infrequent buys that you want when you notice something is running low

Did you use the buttons for these things?

I had a large number of the dash buttons (likely two dozen or so), which I always found to be extremely convenient. When I was running out of some product, a simple press of the button was far more convenient for me than remembering to pick it up the next time I went to the store.

When they discontinued the service, I put all the buttons in a cabinet drawer hoping that they could be "jailbroken" to act as an arbitrary IoT button in the future (like the official Amazon IoT button[1]), but as far as I can tell this never came to fruition (barring a few exceptions) and they're basically doomed to e-waste.

[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/iotbutton/

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