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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

#211

Post by rg111 »

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?

Yes.

If you search for "samsung smartphone" and sort from low to high, all you get are covers and screen protectors in the first many pages.

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

#212

Post by achow »

piva00 wrote: post #205
achow wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. However, supporting all the 'partner devices' comes with associated cost in terms of engg' development and support (somewhat like what Android must be dealing with. Android division in Google would not be a low cost division I'm sure).

It surely does, I work at a place where we also have to deal with multiple partner integrations across multiple vendors and types of devices for our products, there's some overhead for it but not nearly as much as one would expect.

One would not be able to imagine when things operate at mega scale (FAANG level), with world conquering ambitions at Exec level, and particularly in consumer domain.

I was at MS when Windows was a 'thing'. Windows was purely about software, the complexity and support requirements scales in logarithmic scale as more and more OEMs gets involved with their unique hardware, business constraints and cultures.

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

#213

Post by consp »

achow wrote: post #187
somenameforme wrote: post #48

Perhaps a silly question, but can somebody describe how they might lose $10 billion on Alexa in one year? I don't understand the math. That's enough to pay 33,000 employees $330k a year, or some recombination of such. I don't think the real numbers come even remotely close to that. So it presumably has to be hardware costs, but Alexa is software, and they have vertical integration of all servers which presumably woul…

2020 - It took Amazon four years to populate the world with 100 million Alexa-powered devices. It took the company just one more year to more than double that number. The e-commerce titan announced Monday that there are now "hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices" in customers' hands worldwide, a massive increase from the 100 million it announced last January. https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/amazon-sees-a…

Nice numbers but don't those Alexa enabled device bring in revenue offsetting the cost and limiting the loss? Or doesn't anyone have an Amazon premium account or buy anything with Alexa on Amazon?

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

#214

Post by jaygreco »

b112 wrote: post #196
somenameforme wrote: post #48

Perhaps a silly question, but can somebody describe how they might lose $10 billion on Alexa in one year? I don't understand the math. That's enough to pay 33,000 employees $330k a year, or some recombination of such. I don't think the real numbers come even remotely close to that. So it presumably has to be hardware costs, but Alexa is software, and they have vertical integration of all servers which presumably woul…

Perhaps a silly question, but can somebody describe how they might lose $10 billion on Alexa in one year? Amazon seems to be a very poorly run company. So many issues with search, with spam, with listings, and here's another data point... Just bought a laptop. Waited until it was on sale, after doing Linux compatible research. It shows up. 3 days later, it is even more on sale. This is a product sold and shipped by a…

Hah, this is hilarious. I just went through this 30 or so minutes ago. I explained to the CS person that I would in fact be saving money and carbon. “Nope”, he said, just go ahead and repurchase and return.

Insanity. It’s tripping over dollars to save pennies.

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

#215

Post by walterbell »

visarga wrote: post #135
zachlatta wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Research is going strong. The Whisper model, recently open sourced, is great for ASR and runs on the edge. https://openai.com/blog/whisper/

Is there a recommended dev platform to test this model? e.g. Google/Coral TPU, Nvidia Jetson Nano, Rockchip RK3568 NPU, iPhone/Android NPU, ..?

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

#216

Post by cuteboy19 »

mrtksn wrote: post #191
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 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 also why Siri is good enough even though it is destroyed in a trivia contest against Google or Amazon. Voice UI is very bad since you don't have a way to know what it can do reliably. Treating it as general artificial intelligence doesn't work because t…

> Ok Google lock the device

>> I'm sorry I can't do that

> Ok Google clear notifications

>> Opens Bluetooth (!)

> Ok Google WhatsApp call xyz

>> I can't call with duo (!) yet

> Ok Google restart phone

>> To restart your phone

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

#217

Post by piva00 »

achow wrote: post #212
piva00 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It surely does, I work at a place where we also have to deal with multiple partner integrations across multiple vendors and types of devices for our products, there's some overhead for it but not nearly as much as one would expect.

One would not be able to imagine when things operate at mega scale (FAANG level), with world conquering ambitions at Exec level, and particularly in consumer domain. I was at MS when Windows was a 'thing'. Windows was purely about software, the complexity and support requirements scales in logarithmic scale as more and more OEMs gets involved with their unique hardware, business constraints and cultures.

I work for a pretty sizeable corporation, a household name you have heard of or use products from. I don't want to dox myself too much but I can say we are not MS level of support of OEMs (because that's a quite ridiculous bar to cross, haha) but still we do have quite a few integrations across multiple consumer device types.

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

#218

Post by akira2501 »

PostOnce wrote: post #40
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).

It has to listen to detect the activation word, doesn't it? -- therefore, it's listening all the time. The speaker also starts recording a few seconds before a command is issued, meaning there’s likely more private information in the recordings than customers are aware of. from https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/12/18089090/amazon-ech... https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/business/amazon-echo-murd... Those two lin…

Google will let you download your entire voice activation history. That's always an interesting listen.

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

#219

Post by c7b »

achow wrote: post #187
somenameforme wrote: post #48

Perhaps a silly question, but can somebody describe how they might lose $10 billion on Alexa in one year? I don't understand the math. That's enough to pay 33,000 employees $330k a year, or some recombination of such. I don't think the real numbers come even remotely close to that. So it presumably has to be hardware costs, but Alexa is software, and they have vertical integration of all servers which presumably woul…

2020 - It took Amazon four years to populate the world with 100 million Alexa-powered devices. It took the company just one more year to more than double that number. The e-commerce titan announced Monday that there are now "hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices" in customers' hands worldwide, a massive increase from the 100 million it announced last January. https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/amazon-sees-a…

The article says that the hardware was generally sold at cost, though.

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

#220

Post by birdyrooster »

jaygreco wrote: post #214
b112 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps a silly question, but can somebody describe how they might lose $10 billion on Alexa in one year? Amazon seems to be a very poorly run company. So many issues with search, with spam, with listings, and here's another data point... Just bought a laptop. Waited until it was on sale, after doing Linux compatible research. It shows up. 3 days later, it is even more on sale. This is a product sold and shipped by a…

Hah, this is hilarious. I just went through this 30 or so minutes ago. I explained to the CS person that I would in fact be saving money and carbon. “Nope”, he said, just go ahead and repurchase and return. Insanity. It’s tripping over dollars to save pennies.

It's a lack of democracy and autonomy in the workplace. This is what it looks like -- needless waste and bureaucracy.
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