Here is an idea. Use Alexa to produce next seasons of Rings of Power and Wheel of time. Can't possibly do worse than the current teams and you can save couple of billion from development.
Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
51–60 of 378 posts
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#52I use my Alexa all the time, but 99% of it is: Alexa, time! Alexa, set an alarm for 5 minutes! Alexa how many minutes left? Alexa, turn off/on all the lights! That’s basically it. I wrote some apps for it a long time ago to do custom stuff like read me some Reddit pages, but the SDK changed or something and eventually they just died and it wasn’t obvious to me how to recreate it/not worth the effort. I really wish th…
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.
* Turn a named household device on/off.
* Play a song
It's like these services all completely overlook the actions that you'd be taking on your phone anyways.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#53Are any voice assistants making any money? The problem with voice assistants at the moment is the same as command line tools. You have to know what specific prompts work and don’t work etc. I often see my parents make simple queries like “turn off the white lights and turn on the night lights” only to get the response that it can only do one thing at a time. There will be a future where this gets more and more sophis…
Medical records, yes.
But that's not a voice assistant, that's just voice transcription.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#54Perhaps 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…
I think the Echo devices are included, so it means hardware sold. Not sure they were being sold at a profit.
Also, you need to count the server costs, including machine learning training and inference.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#55Are any voice assistants making any money? The problem with voice assistants at the moment is the same as command line tools. You have to know what specific prompts work and don’t work etc. I often see my parents make simple queries like “turn off the white lights and turn on the night lights” only to get the response that it can only do one thing at a time. There will be a future where this gets more and more sophis…
A customer of mine has a product based on DragonNaturallySpeaking that medical doctors use for dictation. They are doing a brisk business. It's all software. No fancy hardware. For this use case, it's almost flawless. And way faster than typing. The only commands you give are related to the recording -- stop/start/playback-type commands. Not sure how sophisticated it gets beyond that. But the speech-to-text technolog…
The part about it being all software surprised me. All the Dragon workstations I've seen have these remote controls attached:
https://www.speechrecsolutions.com/mic_guide_handheld.html
Turns out they're third party devices. That makes Dragon more impressive than I thought.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#56Still boggles my mind that people willingly put these kinds of devices in their homes.
I absolutely concur. I think these are the creepiest pieces of spying one can have. I've never seen one do anything useful. I don't mind walking to my radio to play music and I like using my computer with keyboard and mouse to buy amazon stuff. Plus everyone's mobile device is already this anyhow.
People in the sixties: I better not say that or the government will wiretap my house
People today: Hey wiretap, do you have a recipe for pancakes?[0]
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#57I use my Alexa all the time, but 99% of it is: Alexa, time! Alexa, set an alarm for 5 minutes! Alexa how many minutes left? Alexa, turn off/on all the lights! That’s basically it. I wrote some apps for it a long time ago to do custom stuff like read me some Reddit pages, but the SDK changed or something and eventually they just died and it wasn’t obvious to me how to recreate it/not worth the effort. I really wish th…
Same way I used my google home.
And then one time out of 10 or something it added crap like "by the way, if you ever wanna know about blabla, you can just ask me to do blabla".
Now I don't own a google home mini anymore.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#58do any voice assistants "make money" on their own? i thought they were a combination of 1) a loss leader to keep you in the ecosystem and 2) "well we figured out how to do it, so we did"
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#59I think in the future, products like Alexa will be simple products purchased once for a profit (not loss leaders) that do all the processing locally, not service subscriptions. I mean, do you really need an internet connection and "cloud" services to implement an egg timer you can talk to? Maybe they'll have an internet connection to check weather.gov, but that's about all that's really needed.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#60Perhaps 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…
> This year, an employee familiar with the hardware team said, the company is on pace to lose about $10 billion on Alexa and other devices.
Creative journalism or creative accounting.