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Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

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Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#471

Post by DragonStrength »

paxys wrote: post #86

The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an afterthought. How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed? That demo definitely got applause from a boardroom full of execs. The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. Thi…

They saw “voice” as the next “mobile” and tried to take it over the way Meta wants VR now. The idea of owning a platform the way Apple owns iOS is what drives these companies to delusion.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#472

Post by DragonStrength »

jcranmer wrote: post #453
tgma wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you think of any downside of that proposal at all? Tax inclusive total means government can screw the business and the end user and hide behind the tax inclusive price tag. Jack up the tax it seems the business is doing it.

Funny, given that the product most US consumers are familiar with tax-inclusive pricing (gasoline) is the one product that hasn't had its tax rate changed in decades.

Where? They’re constantly futzing with the taxes on it in my state.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#473

Post by LegitShady »

alexathrowawa9 wrote: post #166
Balgair wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I gotta ask a few questions here, given this oportunity: How many people actually 'worked' there? Like, really did something all day? What was the pay like? What were the internal politics like? Any good stories?

> Any good stories? One time I walked into a dark room with like 50 test devices to get something and somehow accidentally triggered them and all 50 started talking at the same time Was both hilarious and creepy

the furby horror

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#475

Post by toddmatthews »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #465
Spooky23 wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t be baffled… “worlds largest selection” pivoted to worlds largest fence. Financially, the third party product is better for Amazon (no inventory - the third party stuff is a revenue generator!) How exactly does Spooky23 have the buying power to price competitively with a major retailer? The answer is pretty obvious. It’s cheaper to pay crackheads to loot CVS than to troll for clearance blowouts.

> It’s cheaper to pay crackheads to loot CVS than to troll for clearance blowouts. Is that where all the crazy stuff on Amazon is coming from?

Wouldn’t be surprised

https://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#476

Post by ggm »

crazygringo wrote: post #210
swatcoder wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy". Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my decision. This is compounded by the multi-headed monster that large orgs like theirs have no choice but to become. If customers could trust that every day essentials had a relatively stable price and availability pattern like they trust from their local grocery store (…

This a million times. I swear I will never understand why Amazon's supply, organization, and pricing for household goods is such a disaster. Because their experience for mainstream books is mostly perfectly fine -- there's a single listing for each book, and the price doesn't change much, just some discount from list. It works. But for things like paper towels or Tide or whatever, it's utter chaos. Multiple listings…

You lost me when you said their processes for books was "fine" -It may be good in some ways, but my experience of how they wrap it for consumer use is a giant mass of anti-patterns.

Charles Dickens should be the top match on the actual author, or at the very least biographies. But no. Amazon want us to go to "in the style of" or "related to a series which tangentially discussed Oliver twist" linkages "for your convenience"

Amazon will no doubt have A/B testing which shows net beneficial to revenue overall.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#477

Post by tempest_ »

dambi0 wrote: post #469
smt88 wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with it is that it was a stupid idea. People don't shop with their voices and never have. They need to see things.

Restaurants?

Often give or display a menu with prices.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#478

Post by ihkasfjdkabnsk »

rtpg wrote: post #419
ihkasfjdkabnsk wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throwaway, used to work at the NLU unit of Alexa about 5 years ago. There is some ML going on but as with all ML projects I have worked on people want control. This means you add rules for the "important" stuff. You also add test cases to make sure the ML works. But if you already have those test cases, why not just match on them directly? There are also advanced techniques for generating examples (FST for example).…

Is this not actually kind of powerful? Having linguists write up a bunch of rules seems a lot more predictable than "rolling a bunch of dice and hoping that some LLM spits out a coherent set of steps". It feels very fractal but on the other hand if Alexa has only a specific gamut of responses it's not exactly a limitless state space right? Very curious about how those rules look like though

Honestly the FSTs themselves were actually really cool, it's very much GOFAI. It automatically creates lots of permutations, i.e. `play taylor swift`, `please play taylor swift`, play taylor swift now`. etc. And once the FST is built it always works deterministically. It's compiled to a graph and an incoming command is pushed through the state machine, if you get to an end state it "matched the fst" and some specific behaviour would be triggered.

the rule were really just strings and we had efficient matching against it. I didn't work on that, I would assume some sort of LHS.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#479

Post by factormeta »

rtpg wrote: post #419
ihkasfjdkabnsk wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throwaway, used to work at the NLU unit of Alexa about 5 years ago. There is some ML going on but as with all ML projects I have worked on people want control. This means you add rules for the "important" stuff. You also add test cases to make sure the ML works. But if you already have those test cases, why not just match on them directly? There are also advanced techniques for generating examples (FST for example).…

Is this not actually kind of powerful? Having linguists write up a bunch of rules seems a lot more predictable than "rolling a bunch of dice and hoping that some LLM spits out a coherent set of steps". It feels very fractal but on the other hand if Alexa has only a specific gamut of responses it's not exactly a limitless state space right? Very curious about how those rules look like though

wouldn't that just be some kind of NLP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing?

May just be a long list of if/else and/or switch statements or isomorphism.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#480

Post by jimsug »

WalterBright wrote: post #377
cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fun. The person you’ve replied to has stated a concrete (what they perceive to be) benefit of consumer protection regulation. One that doesn’t seem to limit choice at all, but rather improves visibility. I’m also inserting my own personal experience here. The country I live in, which isn’t in Europe, has similar regulation in place. In response you’re throwing around some vague notion of “freedom” and vague i…

The tax exclusive prices lets you know how much the government is soaking you, rather than hiding it and blaming it on the business.

Do shops usually show both prices, so you can see before you have it rung up "how much the government is fleecing you"?
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