All these voice assistants are gimmicks to me, they hardly provide any value, plus never get a proper Portuguese support.
Can't entirely agree, alexa makes navigating smart TVs much easier for older folks
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
#42Alexa can add things to your shopping list but not take them off. You have to manually delete items in your shopping cart. This exemplifies why Alexa was never going to be successful. It is a user hostile experience.
The shopping aspect is approximately useless. It is an awful experience: It seems to be incapable of producing good results, and it is impossible to correct the results without using some manner of computer. This means that it's a lot like shopping with a [pocket] computer is, but with even more steps. (Nobody wants this in its present form. It does not fucking work.) I do enjoy some aspects of having an always-liste…
I'm glad that Amazon thought they could make money with Alexa; mine is currently fantastic as an universal remote control (using Zigbee) and music player (using Spotify).
I could see Ameca only being compatible with Amazon services if it had been launched a few years later.
Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
#43Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
#44That "Downstream impact" metric sounds like a big yikes. Massive incentives to game that metric and before you know it you've got 10 projects all claiming credit for some theoretical downstream impact all of which are actually just canabalizing existing revenue. Like, Amazon is doing $5Bn of revenue selling tide pods, the Alexa team make some claim about people's likeliness to order tide pods via the Alexa and before you know it Amazon is still doing $5Bn of revenue selling tide pods but they've got a $2Bn cost centre of overpaid enginers designing hardware that lets you order tide pods.
I wonder which way this splits for Amazon though, on the one hand lots of people already have Alexas and so you've got great brand recognition when you want to sell your Gen AI doodad. On the other hand, your Alexa brand is trash, everyone knows its basically only good for timers so maybe no one will take them seriously when the Gen AI version comes out.
Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
#45All these voice assistants are gimmicks to me, they hardly provide any value, plus never get a proper Portuguese support.
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Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
#46The entire business model was people being willing to buy things “site unseen”. This is not how people shop. Seeing is an important part of the experience. Also, these losses are staggering. And yet they are still selling these things. I just bought one for the kids dorm room.
It's especially not how people shop at Amazon. You could feasibly imagine a shop where there is basically 1 version of each thing. Like the low cost supermarkets in the UK, they're efficient because they have very small product inventories. In that scenario you say "I'll buy some ketckup" and they only have 1 ketchup so you don't need to see it. You know the shop, you know what you're getting. Amazon is the polar opposite, for any given product it'll have 100,000 options and you have to fight Amazon every step of the way to find what you want, not just what will give Amazon the fattest margin.
Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
#47Alexa can add things to your shopping list but not take them off. You have to manually delete items in your shopping cart. This exemplifies why Alexa was never going to be successful. It is a user hostile experience.
heh I'm sure a PM with a relevant metric punted on that ticket plenty times.
Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
#48Alexa can add things to your shopping list but not take them off. You have to manually delete items in your shopping cart. This exemplifies why Alexa was never going to be successful. It is a user hostile experience.
I ask Alexa to remove things from my shopping list all the time. It always asks you to confirm, but then it does remove it. Sounds like maybe you're talking about the Amazon shopping cart, not the generic shopping list feature?
Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
#49I definitely think Amazon music’s growth is completely Alexa driven but not sure how much revenue that makes
That's definitely true in my case. The only reason I pay for Amazon music is so I can use it on Alexa.
Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
#50> The technology isn’t there, but they have a deadline The technology is there, as demonstrated by OpenAI's ChatGPT Voice Mode. With the resources and talent that Amazon possesses, they should at least be able to demo something similar. It's just that the Alexa organization is a mess, which prevents it from happening.
I assume the piece of technology that is missing is a reliable way to combine generative AI features like ChatGPT Voice Mode with the existing voice assistant features of Alexa.