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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

#151

Post by gibolt »

dcow wrote: post #146

I don’t know if this is a general trend or just me, but Alexa hardly gets my music commands right anymore. I tell it to play music and almost always it insists on playing something similar sounding from the younger generation’s zeitgeist… like it thinks my tastes are too old and and thinks I should be listening to more popular songs. It’s a really bizarre experience recently. Alexa used to just work and play the musi…

It's not just you. I was an avid Alexa user with 1 Google Home just for comparison. Sometime in 2019 or 2020, Alexa got really bad, catching maybe 50% of requests, so they all got replaced with Google devices

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

#152

Post by antifa »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #84
grepfru_it wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually started sorting price from low to high and have found the real price that way. It's interesting to see promoted items $5-10 higher than a similar product thrown randomly in the list

I've been trying to do that, but as soon as i sort, there is a whole bunch of unrelated stuff for pages... How do you address that?

I suspect they do this on purpose to frustrate you into spending more.

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

#154

Post by hateful »

dcow wrote: post #146

I don’t know if this is a general trend or just me, but Alexa hardly gets my music commands right anymore. I tell it to play music and almost always it insists on playing something similar sounding from the younger generation’s zeitgeist… like it thinks my tastes are too old and and thinks I should be listening to more popular songs. It’s a really bizarre experience recently. Alexa used to just work and play the musi…

This is because you are the product, not the customer. The customer is the record company paying to get their artists music into your ears.

I've waited my whole life for AI assistants. I remember being really excited about the promise in the 90s. But it's this is it? Voluntary advertisement consumption?

Very disappointing.

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

#155

Post by gordon_freeman »

Alexa division is losing billions of dollars every year is because Bezos had this dream of creating ambient computing platform with Alexa (like in that ‘Her’ movie) where the hardware and software combination would become invisible for users like us and Alexa would able to do pretty much everything for us. Now they hired thousands of hw and software engineers to execute on that dream but so far the monetizable features are just not getting any traction from the users.

Anecdotally I can give my frequent Alexa commands for Echo here:

- how’s the weather today

- what time is it now

- turn on the TV

- set an alarm for 6am

- play 88.5 fm

- what’s Arsenal score right now.

Now it’s hard to understand how these kind of interactions can earn any money for Alexa.

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

#157

Post by pcthrowaway »

gordon_freeman wrote: post #155

Alexa division is losing billions of dollars every year is because Bezos had this dream of creating ambient computing platform with Alexa (like in that ‘Her’ movie) where the hardware and software combination would become invisible for users like us and Alexa would able to do pretty much everything for us. Now they hired thousands of hw and software engineers to execute on that dream but so far the monetizable featur…

They probably haven't tried settings alarms to be random advertisements yet.

There's probably a market for advertisers who want their victi- ahem, audience to hear their ad first thing in the morning.

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

#158

Post by TulliusCicero »

enumjorge wrote: post #44

> Not many people want to trust an AI with spending their money or buying an item without seeing a picture or reading reviews. I wonder how much the decline in quality of Amazon's marketplace has affected other parts of the company's business including Alexa. I remember a time when, if I wanted to buy something online, I'd just buy off Amazon without shopping around. They almost always had the best price, their shipp…

I find that Amazon is still okay if I already know specifically what I'm trying to order.

But browsing, yeah that shit is a nightmare.

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

#160

Post by xarope »

cryptoz wrote: post #12
kennu wrote: post #9

Earlier 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?

I'd imagine a similarly way to how car cameras work; they buffer for a few seconds, and if they detect a collision, they then save that buffer instead of discarding it.
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