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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

#131

Post by paxys »

dontlikeyoueith wrote: post #130
paxys wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Costco produced such features in their imaginary product, people may use it. The question is would it make people shop more ? If you buy one set of paper towels a week, and Costco rolls out a voice interface, would you now start ordering 2 or 3? If not, what return are they getting on the billions of dollars in additional spending? In reality people would use it for a day, go "neat", and switch right back to the…

> The question is would it make people shop more? No, that's not the question. The question is would it make me shop more AT COSTCO. And yes, it would make me shift some of my purchasing from my local grocery store to Costco. Costco is a long drive that's only worth it for large trips. But if I could voice order for shipping or (even better) delivery? My local grocery with its god-awful parking lot full of blind 90-y…

Huh, we are not talking about building a delivery network here. The comparison is between ordering on a website/app and ordering on Alexa.

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

#132

Post by mgraupner »

jjfoooo4 wrote: post #129
mgraupner wrote: post #120

Speaking of Alexa: Can anyone explain the thought process behind making it possible to change the volume in small increments via buttons, but not via voice command (only in 10% increments)? I only use it as an internet radio player for background music and it's extremely annoying that it can't do that.

You can set the volume to any number from 1-10

Which correlates to 10% and 100%. I want for example 15%, which works with the buttons.

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

#133

Post by _-_-__-_-_- »

genericacct wrote: post #41
pjmlp wrote: post #31

All these voice assistants are gimmicks to me, they hardly provide any value, plus never get a proper Portuguese support.

Can't entirely agree, alexa makes navigating smart TVs much easier for older folks

I managed to set one up for my in-laws. It works well enough with their smart tv (a plasma lg from 2010) that they can say “Alexa cable tv” or “Alexa Die Hard” and it will turn on the tv, find the streaming service that has the movie, and start playing. The voice incantation does have to be fairly specific and it did take some practice to figure it out.

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

#134

Post by dontlikeyoueith »

simonw wrote: post #121
francisofascii wrote: post #96

We pay $179 a year for Amazon music. We use Alexa all the time to play music. How is that not a huge revenue success? It sounds like they are not properly factoring that in as a downstream impact.

It takes a LOT of $179/year subscriptions to pay the salaries of 10,000 engineers. Especially since a lot of that subscription revenue for music will go to licensing the content.

That's not a revenue problem, that's an over-hiring useless employees problem.

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

#135

Post by jetrink »

mgraupner wrote: post #120

Speaking of Alexa: Can anyone explain the thought process behind making it possible to change the volume in small increments via buttons, but not via voice command (only in 10% increments)? I only use it as an internet radio player for background music and it's extremely annoying that it can't do that.

Can't you just ask it to set the volume to a specific volume as a percentage, like 38%? This works on Google Home. In the Google ecosystem, it also usually works if you ask it to raise the volume by a small increment like 5%. (Other times, this sets the volume to 5%.) I think you also used to be able to ask the device to raise the volume 'a bit' or 'a lot', for 5% or 20% respectively, but that stopped working a long time ago and I haven't tried recently.

If neither of these work, then I am very frustrated on your behalf.

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

#136

Post by dawnerd »

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…

It's also why subscribe and save ends up being me cancelling or skipping every month. The prices are not stable enough to blindly trust. One month its cheap, next month it'll be 300% increase.

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

#137

Post by Balgair »

alexathrowawa9 wrote: post #114

Throwaway here but I used to work in Alexa org at Amazon and was amazed by how big the org was (thousands and thousands of people) considering it doesn't seem to be a big revenue generator I remember constantly hearing about projects other teams were working on thinking "why would anyone use that" or "how would that ever make money" Just trying to shoehorn alexa into as many domains as possible It was like empire bui…

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?

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

#138

Post by superfrank »

Years ago, my wife did some contracting work for a team responsible for the voice assistant at one of the major tech companies. Her role required her to work with the directors and VPs and she came home one day to tell me how one of them laid out their grand vision for the product and was talking about how, not only will people use these things to buy every day items, but one day people will be making major purchases like cars with these things.

I can't speak for the Alexa team, but if the execs at Amazon are anywhere close to that delusional, it's no wonder these things are falling short of expectations.

The problem IMO is trust. These devices get simple commands like, "turn off the lights" wrong on a semi-regular basis. No one is going to trust Alexa to buy the right thing until they're confident that it consistently understands them correctly and currently the error rate is just too high. Even if it does understand me, I don't trust Amazon to send me a quality product.

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

#140

Post by im3w1l »

tomjen3 wrote: post #30
msoad wrote: post #18

> The technology isn’t there, but they have a deadline The technology is there, as demonstrated by OpenAI's ChatGPT Voice Mode. With the resources and talent that Amazon possesses, they should at least be able to demo something similar. It's just that the Alexa organization is a mess, which prevents it from happening.

I don't think they can. One of the things that will define the AI era is that the cost of computation for one user drastically outweights what you could normally make in ad revenue. Thats why I have to pay more for Chat-GPT than I do for Netflix. What do you think adoption would look like Alexa costs 20 a month on top of the hardware? Because that may be approximately what it would cost for Amazon to be able to run a…

Maybe AI as a service? End user pays for AI once and most things that need AI capabilities offload it to that provider.
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