I'd pay a monthly/yearly fee to be able to run Alexa's that can function as a smart home voice controller that does not try to sell me stuff.
I'm confused. This is already a thing via vendor, Hubitat or Home Assistant plugins.
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
#102The 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…
Some things Amazon did since the introduction of Alexa have definitely worked at cross purposes to a sightless buying experience as well. Maybe I would order a product sight unseen from 2014 era Amazon, but in the intervening time Amazon has been flooded by cheap knock offs including Amazon's own Amazon Basics. Amazon has also started placing promoted products higher in search results. As a result, even searching for a specific brand name doesn't yield the results you would expect.
Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
#103I'd pay a monthly/yearly fee to be able to run Alexa's that can function as a smart home voice controller that does not try to sell me stuff.
Right. Just charge a low fee, or attach it to Prime somehow. I'd pay for sure.
Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
#104Alexa can add things to your shopping list but not take them off. You have to manually delete items in your shopping cart. This exemplifies why Alexa was never going to be successful. It is a user hostile experience.
In addition to that, the inability of Alexa to just answer your question and shut up seemed to have gone way off the tracks. For most of the things I ask my Echo Show, it just follows up with "by the way, xxxxxxxxxxxx xxxx.... Pricing is $3/month. Do you want it?" Fuck you. This is worse than the salespeople that bother me at Department Stores.
Minus the sales pitch (which I've never had), this is one of the complaints I have about Google Assistant. "By the way, if you ever want to X, just say Y". Just answer the question asked and then shut up immediately.
And, preferably, learn to answer the question asked with more brevity, as well. If I ask "what's the high for today", I don't need to hear "In Cityname, expect a high of 90 degrees", just say "90".
Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
#105The problem with Alexa is that they overpriced it and pocketed the money instead of using the cost of the machine to build something that performed most of its commands on device. Instead, it's reliant on the cloud which is 100% a problem they created. That being said, their "losses" are all just tax write offs that they have to pay themselves, so Amazon doesn't lose a dime.
Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
#106The 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…
I don't think any of that is true. If Costco produced such features in their imaginary product, people may use it. Why? Because Costco has proven itself trustworthy of a blind repeat purchase. You could trust the price you're paying is typical and fair. Amazon on the other hand...
Yes, Costco is like the opposite of the Amazon experience. Costco will only carry a few brands of any given item, but they're all generally pretty good with nothing drop-shipped from a random AliExpress vendor. Their house brand - Kirkland - is pretty good as well. It's a curated set of products with a relatively small number of SKUs vs. Amazon's flea-market-like experience.
Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
#107Imagine putting one of these in your home. Whenever I visit family/friends with one, I unplug it asap. 95% of people just use it to play a song or start a timer. Big waste.
Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t see why one direction is harder than the other. The only thing that makes sense to me is that Amazon is user hostile and tries to dupe people into buying stuff even if they don’t want it.
Amazon is pretty generally user hostile. We see it in their corporte behavior too. I think for that reason culturally they'd struggle to design a device users want to interact with.
That's right. See:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14149986
We all wanted an experience as simple as interacting with the human at Whole Foods checkout OR the robot at the self-checkout, but what we got was this cacophony of anything but what you came here for that is amazon.com and most modern software design.
People wonder why I long for Amazon Go years after I left Seattle and recommended that approach to various retail executives.
Is there any better way to subvert retail than to promote stealing the merchandise as the ultimate UX?
Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
#109The entire business model was people being willing to buy things “site unseen”. This is not how people shop. Seeing is an important part of the experience. Also, these losses are staggering. And yet they are still selling these things. I just bought one for the kids dorm room.
One other reason is that the quality of Amazon listings has really nosedived over the last decade. There are too many spammy merchants in the marketplace now. You cannot just trust the name or description - you need to look at the reviews (or other websites) these days before you feel confident about your purchase. It’s a classic case of mismatched incentives - the Retail org is just focused on increasing sellers and…
There's a video on YouTube of some guy gathering pee bottles discarded by Amazon drivers/contractors, created a fake drink, and got it listed on Amazon to the top spot.
Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
#110The 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…
I don't think any of that is true. If Costco produced such features in their imaginary product, people may use it. Why? Because Costco has proven itself trustworthy of a blind repeat purchase. You could trust the price you're paying is typical and fair. Amazon on the other hand...
To build on the Costco analogy: for any given product category they typically only have three specific options: good, better, best. I could tell Costco bot that I need AA batteries and it would ask me if I prefer Duracell, Kirkland brand, or cheapest. I trust that either of them will be plenty good, so I would say cheapest.
Amazon has a vastly different experience with thousands of indistinguishable Chinese knockoffs. I can only ask Alexa for a very specific product, otherwise I don't trust what I'll get. I use Alexa to add products to my cart, which serves as a reminder that I need to do a little more shopping from my phone or PC.