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Also, these losses are staggering. And yet they are still selling these things. I just bought one for the kids dorm room.
Alexa 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.
I can see why it was the case from engineering standpoint: adding a name from spoken phrase to a list is trivial, but looking up an item (that might not even be there) from a list based on a spoken phrase is prone to transcription errors. The user might refer to it with different phrasing than when it was added too. This is feasible only very recently with LLMs.
I definitely think Amazon music’s growth is completely Alexa driven but not sure how much revenue that makes
> 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.
Does Amazon actually have talent and resources though?
Just throw Alexa away already. It's a wrap.
> 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.
They do have many layers of metrics-massaging incompetent management that spends time attacking the people who do the real work.
Alexa 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.
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.
Alexa 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.
The 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.
It’s a classic case of mismatched incentives - the Retail org is just focused on increasing sellers and listings because they have reviews to bail them out, but Devices really need quality results which Retail is not motivated to provide. Their recent focus on mimicking Temu and Shein is only going to make things worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can see why it was the case from engineering standpoint: adding a name from spoken phrase to a list is trivial, but looking up an item (that might not even be there) from a list based on a spoken phrase is prone to transcription errors. The user might refer to it with different phrasing than when it was added too. This is feasible only very recently with LLMs.
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.
> 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.
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 an AI to power Alexa.
Apple is the only one that is partially immune to this, because they can run the software on your phone, at least some of the time.