I think its great! It’s my alarm and does all the lights. Tells me jokes and the weather.. What more would I use it for?
You can play Jeopardy on it.
Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
11–20 of 378 posts
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#12This is wonderful news. My gf has one in her living room. It is only used to play music, set a timer (usually watch is used) and adding things to a (third party) grocery list. Plus it's listening all the time to what goes on. I had one alexa device: a scanner that would read a barcode and add it to a shopping list (or you could talk to it -- ugh, had to keep it in a drawer). It was handy as I ran out of milk to just…
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?
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#13Still boggles my mind that people willingly put these kinds of devices in their homes.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#14Having worked at startups that wanted to take Alexa into the enterprise space, I'll say that Amazon has been absolutely opposed to the idea, which feels like a missed opportunity.
Up to a point, I can admire the product discipline that Amazon and Apple (Alexa and Siri) have shown in keeping their voice products focused on consumers. But after so many years, when do we finally get voice for the enterprise? At one time, I was very hopeful about this space, see: "I believe in Enterprise software for the Amazon Echo"
http://www.smashcompany.com/business/i-believe-in-enterprise...
In late 2015 and early 2016 this space, of voice tools, was moving quickly and I thought that surely, within a year, we would see better support for enterprise applications. I was mistaken.
Here is an example of the excitement of those times: "Invoxia will allow Alexa to figure out who is speaking"
http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/invoxia-will-allow-al...
At that time, it felt like we were on the cusp of using voice tools in business. There was certainly a market. For instance, https://www.jwt.com/history/ has about 9,000 employees in at least a dozen countries. They reached out to me to talk about their "Pangea" project, which was a huge internal project to better map what teams and skills and resources they had internally. I had a meeting with them in the summer of 2016 and they asked "We are thinking we could put an Amazon Alexa in every meeting room, and then whenever we need someone with a specific skill, we could ask, hey, Alexa, do we have someone at this company who has this skill?"
At that time, I told them of some of the difficulties, but I was also hopeful that things would change a lot of over the next year. I was wrong.
Among the many, many problems we faced was simply getting Alexa to recognize the names of companies, when the sound of the name did not match a standard English spelling:
TATCHA
L’Oréal
L’OCCITANE
What was needed was a way train specific conversions of phonemes to text, for both Alexa and Siri. There are a small number of tricks that are available, such as programming a glottal stop:
http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/using-a-glottal-stop-...
However, in general, neither Amazon nor Apple wants to give us the tools we need, and there has been little progress in recent years.
I know that many people on Hacker News have read my book "How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps" in which we were using NLP technologies to try to allow salespeople to send text messages to Salesforce:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0998997617?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_...
As you can imagine, we hoped to move on to voice-to-text so that salespeople could simply talk to Salesforce.
It seems to me there is a wave of new startups that are waiting to move forward in this area, but no small startup has the resources to build a voice-to-text system from scratch. We need the larger firms to help set up the ecosystem, so that we can move forward in this area.
Where is the company that is going to give us the tools we need to start building great voice driven enterprise solutions?
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#15Are any voice assistants making any money?
The problem with voice assistants at the moment is the same as command line tools.
You have to know what specific prompts work and don’t work etc. I often see my parents make simple queries like “turn off the white lights and turn on the night lights” only to get the response that it can only do one thing at a time.
There will be a future where this gets more and more sophisticated. But in the meantime, it’s not surprising it’s losing money.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#16Earlier 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?
Listening vs listening, transcribing, and sending home
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#17My echo absolutely became less accurate month after month. Simple commands like “turn off the lights” would be 50/50. Very low-value technology and it certainly gives one pause about the feasibility of AI when something so basic with so much capital and years of effort is still fairly poor.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#18I think its great! It’s my alarm and does all the lights. Tells me jokes and the weather.. What more would I use it for?
Music player
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#19Clearly, the answer is to have Alexa read a random unprompted ad every 5 minutes.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#20When I got my first echo device, it was exciting and cutting edge. Voice control was new and it worked reasonably well. A general trend with products like this is that they improve over time, and so I was happy to be along for the ride.
But it never happened. Alexa never got smarter. It still misunderstands basic stuff. You still have to use specific words for specific actions or it gets confused. You still have to maintain silence for a couple of seconds before speaking to anybody else after a command otherwise it will go into a loop of "I don't know that". It still won't play the exact song I want to.
The development experience is also extremely limited and stunted. You cannot run any code on the device, period. You can only define lambda functions that are triggered by voice. The function does not have access to anything from the device, only the spoken words.
You want to incorporate the temperature of the room using the built in sensor? No can do.
You want to know the state of a bulb or a switch? Not possible.
You want to do things on a schedule? Nope, it has to always be in response to a command.
So I'm not surprised they are losing money. They dropped the ball hard. They built an amazing thing and let it stagnate. They've steadily improved the hardware, but totally ignored the software. And software is what's magical about this. A robotic person who talks to you! This has to be pure software play. Hardware is secondary.