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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

#381

Post by laidoffamazon »

asdasdsddd wrote: post #350
alexathrowawa9 wrote: post #114

Throwaway here but I used to work in Alexa org at Amazon and was amazed by how big the org was (thousands and thousands of people) considering it doesn't seem to be a big revenue generator I remember constantly hearing about projects other teams were working on thinking "why would anyone use that" or "how would that ever make money" Just trying to shoehorn alexa into as many domains as possible It was like empire bui…

I've interviewed many people on Alexa before. From what I gather, its just a giant switch statement, and each individual "path" takes a bunch of effort to support and there are thousands of paths for music, ordering, commands, etc. It's peak AI == if statement architecture.

I think describing the NLU Engine as a switch statement is underselling it a bit. Determining domain and intent alone requires more than that (frequently, at least).

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

#382

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

#383

Post by laidoffamazon »

SahAssar wrote: post #378
asdasdsddd wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've interviewed many people on Alexa before. From what I gather, its just a giant switch statement, and each individual "path" takes a bunch of effort to support and there are thousands of paths for music, ordering, commands, etc. It's peak AI == if statement architecture.

Do you mean actual coded if statements as in actually human written code like if (question.match(/^what is (.*)/)) return wikipedia.search(question) or something more automated?

Not like that, but once you get to first party Alexa Skill themselves there's a bunch of match rules that make up a big chunk of the traffic. Don't know exactly how much. The longtail is done through ML means.

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

#384

Post by laidoffamazon »

spike021 wrote: post #124
alexathrowawa9 wrote: post #114

Throwaway here but I used to work in Alexa org at Amazon and was amazed by how big the org was (thousands and thousands of people) considering it doesn't seem to be a big revenue generator I remember constantly hearing about projects other teams were working on thinking "why would anyone use that" or "how would that ever make money" Just trying to shoehorn alexa into as many domains as possible It was like empire bui…

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.

It wasn't for diaper ordering, Alexa has a feature to detect particular sounds (like glass breaking, dog barking etc) for monitoring and alerting purposes. Basically it involved adding hotword recognition for not just the N number of hotwords but also Y number of sounds for particular devices.

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

#385

Post by alexa_throwaway »

enlyth wrote: post #372
alexa_throwaway wrote: post #348

Throwaway here. I'm the CEO of a fast-growing AI startup. Alex asked to meet with us about a year ago (when we were about 1/10th the size), and after asking us to prepare lots of materials, they indicated they wanted to buy us or invest in us. People warned us not to talk to them because they have a reputation for gathering technical detail, and then trying to copy it rather than striking a deal. Our software could h…

> Our software could have radically accelerated and improved the Alexa experience basically overnight By improve the Alexa experience, do you mean make it more useful for users or help it shift more chineseware for Amazon? Because as a user, I will never order anything without seeing a picture and reading reviews, voice shopping is dead on arrival If it's the former, I imagine it's Alexa hooked up to some gimmicky LL…

It's not Alexa hooked up to some gimmicky LLM. I don't want to give away too many details given that this is a throwaway account, but the way Alexa's ecosystem works is they have "skills" Alexa users can instantiate. Our API would have increased the utility (and therefore usage) of some of the top skills by quite a lot.

I think of the Alexa team the same way I think of juiced up bodybuilders who think they can beat up anyone even though they've never trained MMA. The Alexa team looks in the mirror and sees big muscles, but they don't know how to use those muscles to fight. Yes, the strength and muscle helps, but ultimately to do well at MMA you have to develop specific skills, and you need to start with humility.

Anyway, the past is the past. It sounds like Jassy is focused on turning around this division, which is a good thing IMO.

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

#386

Post by apwell23 »

paxys wrote: post #86

The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an afterthought. How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed? That demo definitely got applause from a boardroom full of execs. The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. Thi…

> Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my decision and suddenly order more things.

What about 'subscribe and save' on amazon. I never use it, but curious if it has a similar fate as ordering on alexa.

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

#387

Post by bryananderson »

ysacfanboi wrote: post #275

Please realize, for this to be true, there must be another incentive. I.e., Alexa devices are government-subsidized spyware. What are the advantages for Amazon? - Mic-popping, Camera-popping, mobile phone backdoor access, network sniffing, device activity monitoring across all wifi/bluetooth connected networks. - Sidewalk (remember this? Amazon "borrows" your wifi, for free...) Unplug Alexa devices. Remove the Alexa…

This is hysterical. I never owned one until I worked on the product because I worried it was always recording/transmitting. Turns out it’s not. Promise.

You don’t need a shadowy government cabal to explain Alexa persisting too long in the strategy described in the article. Just a powerful chief executive with an attachment to the product, the sunk cost fallacy, a company with too much revenue to know what to do with, some gameable downstream impact metrics, the inertia of large institutions, and empire building.

It still could’ve become an incredible product if they’d gotten on the LLM chat/agent train early enough, but alas. I mostly use mine to set timers when my hands are full in the kitchen.

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

#388

Post by fbdab103 »

zyberzero wrote: post #264
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…

Fun fact: my local store uses different units for the comparisons. Not that you can choose from that many different units, but for example brand A corn flakes comparison price is price/serving while brand B corn flakes is compared by price/kg. Sure, the serving is based on weight but I still need to do some math to figure out which one is cheaper :) This is one of the biggest food chains in Sweden.

Incredibly common in the US as well to use different units per item. All the better because our garbage measuring system can make unit switches significantly trickier.

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

#389

Post by matrix87 »

LordKeren wrote: post #329
mvanbaak wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is by design— the rhetoric around crypto was specifically tailored to emulate all the new-exciting-tech talking points in an attempt to get new people to buy in to the market and prop up the next rug pull. Every new culturally significant tech is going to sound like crypto from now on. And ultimately I think it is too easy to cynically look at all tech hype through the lens of crypto. I think it is pretty fair t…

> I think it is pretty fair to say that LLMs have already achieved several magnitudes more real use cases than crypto ever did.

If you include black market economic activity, then crypto has done way more and over a much longer period

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

#390

Post by ihkasfjdkabnsk »

asdasdsddd wrote: post #350
alexathrowawa9 wrote: post #114

Throwaway here but I used to work in Alexa org at Amazon and was amazed by how big the org was (thousands and thousands of people) considering it doesn't seem to be a big revenue generator I remember constantly hearing about projects other teams were working on thinking "why would anyone use that" or "how would that ever make money" Just trying to shoehorn alexa into as many domains as possible It was like empire bui…

I've interviewed many people on Alexa before. From what I gather, its just a giant switch statement, and each individual "path" takes a bunch of effort to support and there are thousands of paths for music, ordering, commands, etc. It's peak AI == if statement architecture.

Throwaway, used to work at the NLU unit of Alexa about 5 years ago. There is some ML going on but as with all ML projects I have worked on people want control. This means you add rules for the "important" stuff. You also add test cases to make sure the ML works. But if you already have those test cases, why not just match on them directly? There are also advanced techniques for generating examples (FST for example).

What this culminated in is a platform where 80% of request, and pretty much 99% of "commands" are served by rules built with a team of linguists.

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