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?
Maybe, but it wasn't funny so much as dumb and pointless. And: no, I just use it as a speaker and for setting timers.
We have I think… 5? Echo devices in my house, including an echo dot Amazon just sold me for $1 because it was my “Primeaversary". I haven’t purchased a single thing through them.
Very curious why you would wiretap your home with 5 always-on internet-connected speakers running opaque software for a tech giant. I dunno, it's the sort of thing that would be fit for a robocop-like dystopia just a couple decades ago but is seemingly... "normal" now.
We leave most of them on "mute" most of the time. The one we don't, we use to play music, mostly.
Very curious why you would wiretap your home with 5 always-on internet-connected speakers running opaque software for a tech giant. I dunno, it's the sort of thing that would be fit for a robocop-like dystopia just a couple decades ago but is seemingly... "normal" now.
Because they're convenient. In my house, you'll hear - Alexa, when is the Bills game? Alexa, when is daylight savings. Alexa, play Christmas music. Alexa, what is the etymology of wanker? Alexa, is Chipotle still open? Alexa, how old is Patrick Maholmes? Alexa, what time is it in Kenya? Alexa, ad nauseum. If Amazon wants to datamine the dickens out of that to sell me more socks and USB cables, I really don't care.
Actually Alexa gets most of those same requests in my house, too ;-) Anyway, it's at 12:30.
I bet that’s at cost tbh. You’d be surprised how cheap things have gotten. However, r&d and every single Alexa request costs money. So from day one, it’s losing money.
How much are two hundred million microphones in earshot of private conversations worth?
While I believe that this is actually a simmering threat to society, I have a lot of trust that the current slew of devices are not eavesdropping on you. I believe smartphones to be a much bigger threat.
I’m more worried about smart phones acclimating people go carrying tracking and microphones. But, we find those tools indispensable now, so instead, we seem to want to focus on smart speakers
Which is frankly ridiculous for a company with a yearly revenue of about $500bn and a growth rate topping 10%, even at that scale.
Revenue is not the whole picture either, or growth rate. If it is all loss making or tiny low single digit profit margin, then a $10B loss is still a $10B loss.
Amazon is making money, it's only lost a small amount over its entire lifetime.
Several of its divisions are making a ton of money and even retail could be making more, but it's constantly reinvesting to grow + it's a loss leader.
> 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.
Alexa, what's the wind like today? Worked for me
Totally possible that I just phrased the query in a way it didn't understand, and totally possible that a Google Home just can't do this (or couldn't at the time). If anything, I think that kind of illustrates another important point; not only is it hard to figure out what exactly a given voice assistant is capable of doing, it's also pretty hard to tell the difference between "I need to phrase this differently" and "this device can't answer the question I have". I guess it's like how professional dog trainers say that they're really training the person rather than the dog; the quickest path to getting a voice assistant that people can use isn't just training the language model, but training people to talk to it correctly. This makes sense, given how similar trends happened with text-based search engines.
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…
I think that semantic discussion on what constitutes as "listening" is not as interesting as what it actually does with the signal received from the microphone. I posted a description of that in this thread earlier.
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…
How common of a use case do you think this is?
How common do you think it needs to be for Amazon to invest in special logistics for this pattern (I.e. for it to be a net positive)?
What bothers me isn't just the wasted money and time. It's the opportunity cost of all of those devs not working on other stuff. Alexa pulled talent from everywhere throughout Amazon. It took up a huge portion of the hiring funnel for new devs. All of those people could have been doing useful, money-making, cost-cutting things instead. I can think of at least a dozen really brilliant devs I worked with in Amazon Fulf…
Amazon seems to be lacking in direction much more than talent anyway. There's still no way to limit the search to products that are both in stock and ship to the country I told Amazon to use for calculating shipping rates; while the flood of Chinese scammers would be a difficult problem to solve, increasingly I can't even get scammed because I can't find anything that pretends to ship to my address. It's really baffl…
It’s not baffling, it’s what happens as you approach monopoly status. They’ve got enough of online sales today that they have lost the drive to get better, unless better is more money.