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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

#291

Post by shermantanktop »

bagels wrote: post #169
spike021 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once heard about a feature dogfooding invite that was sent out specifically for people with babies because they wanted to use Alexa always-listening to activate when a baby was crying and automatically order diapers or something ridiculous like that.

Doesn't even make sense. Babies cry all the time for a multitude of reasons, none of which are informed by how many diapers are in the house.

Babies just need to learn to cry only when the diapers in the garage are running low. How hard could that be?

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

#292

Post by sundvor »

RheingoldRiver wrote: post #216
S0y wrote: post #113

>Customers actually used Echo mostly for free apps such as setting alarms and checking the weather. “We worried we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer,” said a former senior employee. That's actually really funny to read. Just last night I was watching my brother cook and he asked Alexa to set a timer (It's pretty much the only thing he uses it for...) I jokingly said "You know, that's a really expen…

I really enjoy this joke, "Wow, my laptop is a really expensive clipboard today" "My monitor is a really expensive webcam stand" "My phone is a really expensive alarm clock" It's never not funny to me

Tesla: Really bloody expensive outside thermometer.

(Via the app climate page, my Model 3 is in an detached-adjacent garage where zero attempt was made to insulate the gaps)

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

#293

Post by monero-xmr »

mvanbaak wrote: post #235
textlapse wrote: post #225

If Amazon (and Google and Apple) couldn’t figure out how to monetize a voice/chat ‘app’ after a decade of plowing money into it, how does the whole LLM market come to fruition? Genuinely curious as I see a similar trend: there is definite consumer interest, but just like ‘kitchen timers on Alexa’ what if the LLMs main use case is simply to generate funny memes and the most basic RAG? How does this manifest into a tri…

hype, marketing, investors spent millions so lets make it happen. It feels a lot like the whole crypto thing

But bitcoin and ethereum are near all time highs, while Alexa is laying everyone off and AI has no paying customers…

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

#294

Post by rty32 »

conradfr wrote: post #245
textlapse wrote: post #225

If Amazon (and Google and Apple) couldn’t figure out how to monetize a voice/chat ‘app’ after a decade of plowing money into it, how does the whole LLM market come to fruition? Genuinely curious as I see a similar trend: there is definite consumer interest, but just like ‘kitchen timers on Alexa’ what if the LLMs main use case is simply to generate funny memes and the most basic RAG? How does this manifest into a tri…

They are useful for customer service.

Here is the thing. Most of the time I call customer service because the app/website does not provide the information or the ability to do certain things, and I need to talk to a human to get things explained or get something done. And more than a few times customer service agents don't know what they are doing or are just talking nonsense, and I need to escalate to a manager.

You think you can trust an LLM to make decisions for something like resetting password or closing an account?

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

#295

Post by polynomial »

booi wrote: post #220
crazygringo wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This a million times. I swear I will never understand why Amazon's supply, organization, and pricing for household goods is such a disaster. Because their experience for mainstream books is mostly perfectly fine -- there's a single listing for each book, and the price doesn't change much, just some discount from list. It works. But for things like paper towels or Tide or whatever, it's utter chaos. Multiple listings…

It's ridiculous that I have to have a spreadsheet with pricing information and links for household goods just to spot check and make sure I'm getting the actual price per quantity that I want due to the multiple dynamic listings that change every day nightmare. Don't ask how many times I receive more or less than I thought I would or something came in 10 packages of 3 instead of 1 30x package.

This creates the opportunity for a start up offering such spreadsheet management as a service to flourish in the ecosystem whether or not Amazon ends up acquiring them. Yes I am being facetious. (obvi)

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

#296

Post by sa46 »

bagels wrote: post #169
spike021 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once heard about a feature dogfooding invite that was sent out specifically for people with babies because they wanted to use Alexa always-listening to activate when a baby was crying and automatically order diapers or something ridiculous like that.

Doesn't even make sense. Babies cry all the time for a multitude of reasons, none of which are informed by how many diapers are in the house.

Interestingly, there is an app, Chatterbaby [1], that claims to detect why a baby is crying based on the acoustic features of the cry. I've used it with middling success.

That'd be a neat integration: "Alexa, why is my baby crying?"

[1]: https://www.chatterbaby.org/pages/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41390-019-0592-4

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

#297

Post by [deleted] »

crazygringo wrote: post #210
swatcoder wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy". Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my decision. This is compounded by the multi-headed monster that large orgs like theirs have no choice but to become. If customers could trust that every day essentials had a relatively stable price and availability pattern like they trust from their local grocery store (…

This a million times. I swear I will never understand why Amazon's supply, organization, and pricing for household goods is such a disaster. Because their experience for mainstream books is mostly perfectly fine -- there's a single listing for each book, and the price doesn't change much, just some discount from list. It works. But for things like paper towels or Tide or whatever, it's utter chaos. Multiple listings…

[deleted]

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

#298

Post by jabroni_salad »

swozey wrote: post #240
AlexandrB wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Costco is like the opposite of the Amazon experience. Costco will only carry a few brands of any given item, but they're all generally pretty good with nothing drop-shipped from a random AliExpress vendor. Their house brand - Kirkland - is pretty good as well. It's a curated set of products with a relatively small number of SKUs vs. Amazon's flea-market-like experience.

Costco really needs to get new products in or I don't think it will do well with genz and younger millennials. I hadn't been to a Costco since I was a kid so I had completely forgotten that the only stock (maybe) a few versions of specific items. I went a year or two ago thinking I'd come home with months worth of groceries and I was shocked that it STILL looked like the inside of a 1990s fridge and cabinet with such…

Are there actually good juices on the public market? I'm pretty sure anything you don't squeeze yourself has been reconstituted from parts.

I was chatting up a hotel chef recently and he told me the lil 8oz of 'proper' orange juice he gave me cost more to put on the table than the entire rest of the breakfast combined.

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

#299

Post by loire280 »

pjc50 wrote: post #244
textlapse wrote: post #225

If Amazon (and Google and Apple) couldn’t figure out how to monetize a voice/chat ‘app’ after a decade of plowing money into it, how does the whole LLM market come to fruition? Genuinely curious as I see a similar trend: there is definite consumer interest, but just like ‘kitchen timers on Alexa’ what if the LLMs main use case is simply to generate funny memes and the most basic RAG? How does this manifest into a tri…

> how does the whole LLM market come to fruition? It replaces all the David Graeber "bullshit jobs". As well as about 90% of the education system. It's not replacing them with something better , but it is cheaper.

Except according to Graeber those jobs exist because leaders, companies, and society like having lots of employees doing this work for various reasons and we all more or less tacitly agree that the output of those jobs is useless and only exists because the last 50 years of productivity gains mean there isn't enough real work to keep everyone busy for 40+ hours 50 weeks a year.

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

#300

Post by ryandrake »

linsomniac wrote: post #273
mschuster91 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vote for politicians that campaign on consumer protection legislation. Here in Europe, it's been mandatory to show a price related to a reasonable common base point (e.g. liter, kilogram, piece, usage-unit for laundry detergent) adjacent to the actual product's price for many years now. You can go and use 1/10/100 grams/milliliters though for small scale packages where that is reasonably common (e.g. spices), and tha…

Here in the US with Amazon it will usually give you a price per quantity, though that can vary between "each", "oz", etc... The real issue being complained about is that there may be 10 listings in Amazon for "Tide Pods", so if you say to Alexa "Order Tide Pods" you aren't sure what you'll get, what quantity, or what price. Amazon REALLY needs to do some product normalization. It is true that if you go into a grocery…

Even if you search for the exact item, including the brand name and the size, you get pages and pages of choices, many of them just wrong.

I just did a search for "sprayway glass cleaner 19 oz 1 pack". This contains all the information you need to uniquely identify a single product. Brand, Product, Size, Quantity. Yet Amazon returns 3 pages of crap, including Wrong Brand, Wrong Product, Wrong Size, and Wrong Quantity. I can't make the query any more specific, Amazon, what the hell is your problem? This query should return one and only one result.

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