Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 871 posts

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

#521

Post by maronato »

WatchDog wrote: post #447
textlapse wrote: post #225

If Amazon (and Google and Apple) couldn’t figure out how to monetize a voice/chat ‘app’ after a decade of plowing money into it, how does the whole LLM market come to fruition? Genuinely curious as I see a similar trend: there is definite consumer interest, but just like ‘kitchen timers on Alexa’ what if the LLMs main use case is simply to generate funny memes and the most basic RAG? How does this manifest into a tri…

If OpenAI ends up releasing the GPT-4o voice model they demoed, I feel like I would use it a lot, especially while driving.

Isn’t it out already? I can definitely use something very similar right now on their app.

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

#522

Post by smt88 »

fuzztester wrote: post #511
smt88 wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with it is that it was a stupid idea. People don't shop with their voices and never have. They need to see things.

>People don't shop with their voices and never have. >They need to see things. Nyet. Non. Nada. What world do you live in? People seeing things and then shopping with their voices are not mutually exclusive actions. Not only are they complementary, they are very common, and must have been from the dawn of shops. How many billions of times, worldwide, must people have looked around at some products there, and said "gi…

Alexa shopping was intended to be voice only. Of course people order things with their voice after they've seen them or read a menu.

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

#523

Post by tomoyoirl »

eru wrote: post #513
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…

> 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 that's it. That's pretty irrelevant to the discussion at hand. It's abou…

Amazon is kind enough to include unit pricing on many UI elements.

It does seem to be less than consistent about the units, though. $/count, $/oz, $/g, $/lb, all on the same search page? Yes, and more :)

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

#524

Post by HWR_14 »

lancesells wrote: post #452
linsomniac wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in the US with Amazon it will usually give you a price per quantity, though that can vary between "each", "oz", etc... The real issue being complained about is that there may be 10 listings in Amazon for "Tide Pods", so if you say to Alexa "Order Tide Pods" you aren't sure what you'll get, what quantity, or what price. Amazon REALLY needs to do some product normalization. It is true that if you go into a grocery…

I'm not saying Alexa would be used more, but what if it confirmed with you on either the quantity or the last quantity of the item you ordered? "The same order of Tide Pods as last time?"

Except then you have to wonder if the price changed. Or if something else about the listing changed.

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

#525

Post by smt88 »

dambi0 wrote: post #482
tempest_ wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often give or display a menu with prices.

Often or always? Is reading a generic description of a product (menu) seeing the thing? What about alcoholic drinks in pubs or bars “2 pints of your best and a glass of house red”. Alexa may not be great for purchasing from Amazon but this isn’t because humans have never shopped using only their voices. Nor is seeing things required.

People who can see and read almost never use voice-only to shop.

Restaurants and catalogs have menus. Street vendors show you their goods.

You don't need to take my word for it. No one uses Alexa this way. The proof is in the outcome.

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

#526

Post by neltnerb »

ethbr1 wrote: post #363
doubled112 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like a UPC?

Are UPCs stable at scale and over time? It's been a minute since I was in retail, but I remember there being a bunch of asterisk-but's around them.

They're not perfect, and I think Amazon does combine listings for the same item (see "other sellers"), but the bigger issue is that the system prioritizes getting you exactly what you ask for over warning you of weird market shenanigans or out of stock sellers meaning prices are way higher than usual.

If Target is out of the brand of paper towels I like I don't go to the next store and buy them no matter the price, I get a different brand or skip it. If I had a human shop for me, they would also get a different brand of skip it. But that logic doesn't work with Amazon so it's not safe to trust it.

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

#527

Post by fuzztester »

smt88 wrote: post #522
fuzztester wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People don't shop with their voices and never have. >They need to see things. Nyet. Non. Nada. What world do you live in? People seeing things and then shopping with their voices are not mutually exclusive actions. Not only are they complementary, they are very common, and must have been from the dawn of shops. How many billions of times, worldwide, must people have looked around at some products there, and said "gi…

Alexa shopping was intended to be voice only . Of course people order things with their voice after they've seen them or read a menu.

how about IVR? or an advanced, literally voice-only version of it, where you don't even have to press any digit keys to respond to voice menus?

heh. maybe I should become a consultant to Jeff, charge him gigabucks.

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

#528

Post by nickm12 »

conductr wrote: post #494
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…

My take on it was that Alexa was developed at a time they were trying really hard to solidify their continued existence as a tech company; AWS and kindle came around then too. The stock market values tech companies much higher than retail companies. That’s what justified the headcount expense

AWS and Kindle were developed a decade before the Echo.

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

#529

Post by HWR_14 »

tgma wrote: post #288
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…

Nah. Just choose to buy the way you wish to. Vote with your money and don’t artificially restrict where there’s zero issues. Everything works out in the end. I’d much rather transact in the US than Europe. The entire retail customer experience and return policy is unmatched. The last thing I want is for some government regulation to make it suck like Europe.

How will the government enforcing a minimum bar on return timelines lead to a worse experience at stores that already exceed those metrics? It might be unnecessary, but how would it hurt?

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

#530

Post by nickm12 »

S0y wrote: 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…

I love using my Echo while cooking in the kitchen. Timers, music, news. All great features while my hands are occupied and covered with chicken grease or whatever.
Post reply on HN