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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

#111

Post by PieUser »

29athrowaway wrote: post #80
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…

I use Alexa for everything. - To ask for the weather, weather alerts, relative humidity, precipitation, wind speed - To ask about outdoor air quality, indoor air quality (requires air quality monitors) - As a baby monitor (crying detector routine) - To know when to empty the dehumidifier bucket (humidity > 60% routine) - To know when someone left the AC fan off (high CO2 routine) - To know when to open the window (hi…

Nah you totally could.

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

#112

Post by mr_tristan »

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 games in terms of money right now. Voice platforms seem like they could do something similar, but all the platforms want to be your shopping AI or whatever. Just seems like the two worlds - voice platform and game developers - just could never get together and figure things out.

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

#113

Post by MBCook »

Mistletoe wrote: post #93
bigtunacan wrote: post #22

From the article, "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." This is mostly how I use Alexa, but those requests to play music are backed by an annual Amazon Music Unlimited subscription that I wouldn't bother with if I didn't have Alexas throughout the house.

I guess I'm surprised they didn't know this would happen? Why on earth would I shop with Alexa? All price comparisons, reading of reviews and double checking for errors goes out the window. I'm not going to say add paper towels and just trust Alexa to add the best value to my cart. The best it has ever done is remind me when I need to reorder Gatorade powder and I would have ordered that anyway when I was out.

To whatever degree I might have ever done that, because Amazon went to the Marketplace model of putting all seller equal there are 15 duplicates of everything which may have very different prices.

Back when it was only Amazon it may have been possible to Alexa to buy some very specific thing (“buy Mario Party 23 for Switch”) but. Now I wouldn’t be able to trust even that.

So say nothing of worries about kids/guests/accidental activations ordering things.

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

#114

Post by ALittleLight »

Without genuine understanding voice is just a terrible method for control. I don't know what the options are or what exactly I'm supposed to say. Alexa is overly verbose too. The control feels very clumsy, though it's sometimes good enough.

I am imagining GPT-4 on the other end with a suite of controls. If Alexa could understand what I'm talking about and all of the options available to it I think it would be a much better system. I could also imagine a system that's always listening and proactively acting on my behalf without my even giving directions. If hardware advances to the point where I could run a model this size locally? That would solve privacy concerns and improve latency. How far are we from running GPT-4 on commodity hardware? 20 years?

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

#115

Post by MBCook »

arbuge wrote: post #72

I question the accounting here. My kids use our Echo Dot to play music using our Amazon Prime subscription all the time. It's what makes me renew that subscription when it comes due.

Sounds like you did what they wanted.

But I bet most people don’t. They probably use them for competing services like Spotify that not only don’t make Amazon money but reinforce the feeling of not caring about Amazon music.

I’m in the Siri world, but I’m with the other posts in this thread. 99% of my usage is simple stuff like timers, math problems, smart home, etc. stuff that just won’t ever drive anyone’s revenue directly.

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

#116

Post by HDThoreaun »

AlexandrB wrote: post #109
putlake wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've heard, AWS prices for large customers like Netflix are a lot lower than for Alexa or Amazon Retail. Netflix has the option to switch to GCP or Azure; Alexa doesn't so they don't get those discounts.

What does it mean for Alexa to "pay" for AWS though? Is it recorder as revenue somewhere or does it just get accounted for internally?

Probably means Alexa loses $10 billion instead of $9.5 or whatever and has to fire some more people

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

#118

Post by laurencerowe »

putlake wrote: post #105
thereisnospork wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over billed from AWS to make that part of the balance sheet look good? (entirely speculation)

From what I've heard, AWS prices for large customers like Netflix are a lot lower than for Alexa or Amazon Retail. Netflix has the option to switch to GCP or Azure; Alexa doesn't so they don't get those discounts.

That honestly surprises me. Having worked at a small subsidiary of a different big tech giant our costs for the big tech's cloud were charged at cost price at the behest of the accountants.

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

#119

Post by jahewson »

29athrowaway wrote: post #80
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…

I use Alexa for everything. - To ask for the weather, weather alerts, relative humidity, precipitation, wind speed - To ask about outdoor air quality, indoor air quality (requires air quality monitors) - As a baby monitor (crying detector routine) - To know when to empty the dehumidifier bucket (humidity > 60% routine) - To know when someone left the AC fan off (high CO2 routine) - To know when to open the window (hi…

> Vacuuming, mopping

Please elaborate.

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

#120

Post by diceduckmonk »

zachlatta wrote: post #97
monero-xmr wrote: post #17

My 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.

I’ve been wondering if I’ve been going crazy. It’s gotten way worse for me too. I have to ask 3-4 times to turn the lights off sometimes.

I’ve been assuming physical factors like dust was degrading the microphone quality
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