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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

#401
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…

don't get me wrong, it is silly, but also being able to set a timer without touching anything with your gross cooking hands is unironically a wonderful feature.

I wonder how feasible it would be these days to create a single-purpose voice-controlled kitchen timer product, at a price the market would like? Sounds like it might do well... unless nobody needs it cause they already have Alexa!

But yeah, I think a lot of Alexa's get used mainly for kitchen timers!

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

#402
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…

I noticed that in the past year my Alexa speakers have gotten really great at handling long tail fact-finding questions (about history, health, etc.). I use it a few times a week to learn something, when I don't feel like picking up a device.

I actually trust it much more than ChatGPT since it never hallucinates and it cites its source.

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

#403
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Are there actually good juices on the public market?

I never found one.

Fruit juices consist of fructose. It's bad for you in high quantities, just like sugar. Eating a piece of fruit is healthy for you - fructose in small quantities, and the rest of the fruit slows down its digestion. Fruit juice is a fructose bomb.

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

#404
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

if you want healthier juice....buy a juicer and make it yourself. You're never going to get healthy options from a wholesaler who buys from massive brands that are not known for healthy options. Long term, making it yourself is cheaper too. Most of the time in the juice space, anything that is designed to be shelf-stable in a warehouse is not. at. all. healthy. It's packed with preservatives and other stabilizers tha…

I tried multiple juicers, but they were too hard to clean, so I stopped using them.

The Vitamix is easy to clean, so that's the winner for me.

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

#405
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Quantit…

Pretty sure that's Amazon selling your query results, not a failure in search algorithm.

For the sponsored returns to the search query, sure. But for the rest, isn't that the fuzzy search crapping the bed in the face of our expectations?

When I specify what I want I want the search to return what I searched for, not a lot of kinda similar junk. I've tried to explain the concept of fuzzy search to my girlfriend a few times and she still gets annoyed when a search for "24"x24" shadow box" returns a whole bevy of standard picture frames at an utterly random spread of sizes, for example.

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

#406
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really. I was just using OJ as an example because for whatever reasons I've been paying attention to the pricing of different breakfast places OJ + grocery OJ since covid. I pay $7 for "fresh squeezed" from Einsteins, but Syrup a popular breakfast place next to me charges $8.99 for a cup about half the size of that. I made that mistake once.

I was just hoping for healthier, zero/low sugar options of a lot more things at Costco. If I ever have a zero/low sugar option, I usually get it. I haven't drank a full sugar soda in a decade and avoid all sugar so my tolerance to sweet things is super low. Black coffee, etc.

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

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had to do a double take a few weeks ago when I found the price/unit to be drastically different for the name brand to the store brand of something, until I realized they strategically switched the (# to oz I think it was) to make the store brand look astronomically cheaper instead of just slightly cheaper.

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

#408
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I find that Costco in store generally has stuff that tends to follow local consumer preferences. It is worth mentioning that Costco.com does not stock the same things that the physical stores sell, more-so than any other retailer I know of. And different stores have a lot of latitude in what they stock. My nearest store has tons of things like sugar free sodas, pro-biotic soda, kombucha, no sugar added juices, and ju…

Weird, I'm in Denver, pretty healthy crowd here but maybe that Costco is just bad. Nothing like that there.

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

#409

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…

Nothing on Amazon is going to work like books on Amazon do.

Amazon is, originally and primarily, a bookstore. Amazon has long-established direct contracts with all book publishers (and in fact, a stranglehold over those publishers.) Any time you see a book listed on Amazon, it's a book sold by Amazon, attained directly from one of these publishers.

AFAIK no third-party sellers are even allowed to sell "books" Fulfilled By Amazon; if you see a third-party FBA "book" on Amazon, it's because the seller slipped it in under some category other than "books." (The "novelties" and "calendars" sections are often abused for this.)

But for categories other than books, Amazon never built up this same direct logistical pipeline to suppliers, let alone the sort of stranglehold over suppliers in other categories that they have over book suppliers. So Amazon doesn't have the ability to force constant, even, predictable supply with contractually-set pricing in other categories, the way they can with books.

Often, this means that Amazon's first-party supply chain for something, might just run out of that thing entirely.

Part of the reason the FBA program exists is that it allows Amazon to take advantage of third parties' connections to suppliers to compensate for their own supply-chain deficits. Amazon-the-asset-holder might have run out of e.g. Kleenex, but that doesn't mean that Amazon-the-site or Amazon-the-pool-of-warehouses has run out of Kleenex, because Amazon has allowed some third-party FBA seller to stock stuff in their warehouses, and that seller happens to have brought in some stock that have the UPC code for Kleenex. So hey, there you go, we have Kleenex after all! Only now Amazon has to follow the seller's dictates on pricing and discounts — and your experience on availability (unless/until first-party supply comes back) will be dictated by the seller's (usually much-less-predictable) ability+desire to resupply.

There are situations where this model actually makes sense! Some mid-sized OEMs that Amazon doesn't feel are worth their while to engage with directly, instead sell their products directly through Amazon as FBA sellers. In these cases, buying the product on Amazon is just like buying the product through the seller's website, but you get it faster because it's already in an Amazon warehouse.

That said, despite FBA having times where it makes a lot of sense, I also find Amazon Marketplace distinctly baffling. A thing sold by a third party, shipped by that third party, with returns handled by that third party, shouldn't be able to be conflated with an Amazon.com/Amazon FBA listing just because of a shared UPC code! Those are two very distinct experiences and are not fungible, and it's bizarre to pretty much everyone I know that Amazon has tried to conflate them.

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

#410

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.

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).…

Later on, there were methods to generate FSTs themselves without manual human curation.
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