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Alexa 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 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.
Wanna share with us your thought process?
> More than half of customers who buy smart-camera doorbells from Ring, another profitable Amazon device that the company bought in 2018, purchase security subscriptions. Security... Subscriptions?
Cloud storage. Downside is that only clips with detections are uploaded (plus a capture every n seconds). Alternative is something like ubiquiti that stores locally, so you get 24/7 recordings but it can be stolen or destroyed.
The 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.
You bought an Alexa..... For the kids dorm room...? Wanna share with us your thought process?
Alexa 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.
That "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…
That said… Alexa seems like such a waste. It’s like Sony making an MP3 player. Sony Electronics was never going to make a good MP3 player as long as Sony Records wanted copy protection. These are user-hostile decisions that protect the larger business. Likewise, can Amazon deliver an AI assistant that does something else, besides get people to buy more products through Amazon more easily? No, the incentives aren’t there.
Alexa 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can see why it was the case from engineering standpoint: adding a name from spoken phrase to a list is trivial, but looking up an item (that might not even be there) from a list based on a spoken phrase is prone to transcription errors. The user might refer to it with different phrasing than when it was added too. This is feasible only very recently with LLMs.
I don’t see why one direction is harder than the other. The only thing that makes sense to me is that Amazon is user hostile and tries to dupe people into buying stuff even if they don’t want it.
Alexa 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.
How does shopping with one even work in practice? Most items I buy on Amazon require careful scrutiny to make sure I’m getting the right thing. What I want is almost never the first result. This is true even in areas that feel like they should be easy, like video games.
I use it sometimes for new items, usually when I know what I want and I specify brand. If it's not the first item, I can easily see the other options on the screen and it's not much to say to buy the second or third item on the list.