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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

#301

Post by papito »

saghm wrote: post #132
SkyPuncher wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my compliant with all of this voice control stuff. The dev teams are so damn focused on being able to answer some esoteric query that you're asking as joke, they forget that you only want to do like 5 basic things: * Set an alarm/reminder * Read then send a text message (while driving). It doesn't even have to be good. Just something that I can send while driving. * Maybe.....maybe ask for the weather.…

> Maybe.....maybe ask for the weather I remember one time I asked my Google Home the weather to see if it was cold enough to put on a jacket, and after hearing a temperature that I was ambivalent about, I took a risk and tried asking it what the wind speed was. It started reading out the Wikipedia page for "wind speed" until I told it to stop.

Echo can actually tell you wind speed and humidity (with forecast). I use that a lot. Also, I like to run at dawn, so I often ask the Echo when the sunrise is.

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

#302

Post by adrr »

michaelt wrote: post #279
sokoloff wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s got to be at least $5-7 to take my payment, pick, pack, and deliver it.

I can get a wifi-enabled microcontroller delivered from China for $3.40 [1] including payment, picking, packing and delivery. And the product is at least $1 of that price. I find it hard to believe Amazon is spending more than $2 on payment and delivery. [1] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004563128378.html

Amazon puts good components in their Echos.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Amazon-Echo-tear...

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

#303

Post by cardosof »

The three basic options: either the price for the product pays for itself and its future costs, or the product needs a subscription to run properly, or ads.

Amazon didn't want the first route so they could gain market share/penetration quickly, so we're stuck with options 2 and 3. Voice assistants are a new media and people hate ads, especially where they are not expecting them - so no wonder they failed to insert ads there. We're left with what I believe they'll end up doing - requiring a prime subscription.

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

#304

Post by thehappypm »

edgyquant wrote: post #180
mr_tristan wrote: post #112

After timers, the #1 use of Alexa in my house: 'make a fart noise'. We've tried to use Alexa for some games, like Jeopardy or Whose Line Is It Anyway, but it always is an incredibly buggy experience. Even just simple multiple choice games should work perfectly, and yet, a lot of the time even basic answers don't register, and the games themselves crash. I've always wondered - stupid mobile games are dominating video…

This is the result of a propped up economy avoiding recessions at all cost. These large conglomerates are completely out of touch and money has been so cheap they were not really competing for or providing good services.

Why does everyone have an obsession with “cheap money”? You still need to pay a loan back, can reduced interest on a loan really prop up a company up? I feel like that vastly overstates the impact of interest costs on business’s bottom lines

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

#305

Post by kennu »

SoftTalker wrote: post #136
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).

Have you actually verified that it isn't? Which assumption is the safer one?

Safe assumptions are great for managing personal privacy, but in my view, one should be careful not to present them as facts in discussions. E.g. I use privacy shields on cameras to mitigate risk of eavesdropping, but I don't claim it's actually happening. People have also reverse engineered Echo devices and analyzed their network traffic, and when someone claims the devices are "listening to everything", I'm interested in whether the claim is really based on such analysis.

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

#307

Post by tzs »

rg111 wrote: post #271
vishnugupta wrote: post #171

I'll add little bit of context from Kindle Reader which was developed while I was at Amazon. Though I was in no way involved with it I frequently interacted with senior folks who were. For first few years, Kindle Reader was a massive sink hole at multiple levels. There was this humongous R&D cost, hardware and software. On a recurring basis Amazon absorbed cellular data charges. Remember this was in early 2008 so cel…

These two are fundamentally different. Books always existed. They are a concrete, well-defined, well-understood, ubiquitous object. You just wanted to sell a new way towards it. But audio-things aren't even properly defined.

Voice controlled assistants also have always existed. We call them "children".

Probably most of us who were kids before remote controls were common remember changing channels and turning off lights and opening garage doors, all in response to voice commands from our parents.

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

#308

Post by hotpotamus »

wikfwikf wrote: post #256
Rebelgecko wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon used to be happy to price match themselves within a month or so of a purchase, or do things like let keep a cheap item you wanted to return. My guess is that they did some A/B testing and found that the "irrational" behavior actually saves them money. In your example, if 50% of people don't bother going through the return process they still come out ahead.

My guess is that they also might do market segmentation analysis to understand what type of customer you are, and this affects the return policy. For example, you consistently buy small ticket household items and rarely return anything: when you do return something they will be helpful and generous to keep you happy. You buy large amounts of fairly expensive clothes and shoes but return around 50% after trying on. Th…

Somewhat famously, Best Buy did this and differentiated customers into "Angels and Devils"[0].

I've always assumed there's some sort of credit score system built into every retailer account, and am somewhat conscious to try to keep it positive.

[0]https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=32709

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

#309

Post by ctvo »

subpixel wrote: post #85
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…

This. Alexa is a trust-interface. Many consumers don’t trust Amazon anymore, so they sure as hell won’t trust some bot to spend their money for them there. I just decided not to buy an item from Amazon despite it being cheaper, because I need it and I don’t have time to deal with it being a model from a previous year or whatever the catch may be.

> Many consumers don’t trust Amazon anymore

How did you come to this conclusion?

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

#310

Post by luckylion »

mcphage wrote: post #299
luckylion wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hey Alexa, I need a new pan, mine is old and broken" - "I have the Pan Frying Pan Cooking Pan Cooking Children Family Happy Best Pan from Fhrgwdsst for $14.99, would you like me to order it for you?"

I think my favorite notification was a few months ago—my echo speaker turned yellow because there was a notification. My kids find this incredibly exciting, and told Alexa to play it. And then Alexa announced to us, in breathless terms, that bananas are a good source of potassium. It even said "this is B A N A N A S", as only a robot can.

Humor probably helps a lot with making people feel better around these devices. Are you using it for anything non-trivial?
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