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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

#531

Post by wombatpm »

jonhohle wrote: post #501
booi wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ridiculous that I have to have a spreadsheet with pricing information and links for household goods just to spot check and make sure I'm getting the actual price per quantity that I want due to the multiple dynamic listings that change every day nightmare. Don't ask how many times I receive more or less than I thought I would or something came in 10 packages of 3 instead of 1 30x package.

I worked at Amazon when Fresh was rolling out in Seattle. A coworker thought he was ordering 10 bananas but when his order arrived he received 10 bunches of bananas. Generously, he brought them in to share along with the story. I’m sure they made a lot of banana bread the following week.

All stores have problems with produce. Is that 2.99 a pound for peaches, bag or each?

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

#532

Post by thaumasiotes »

dambi0 wrote: post #462
sebastiennight wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like I'm not the only European that has seen a price tag of $9.50 on a product I wanted, only to find out that the $10 bill in my pocket was only two thirds of the amount needed! Look at us poor Europeans with our metric-system money-math

Was the markup just sales tax or did it include tips or extra fees? A 35% plus sales tax seems awfully high where in the US was it?

A ~10% sales tax is normal, and that will bring $9.50 over the $10 limit.

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

#533

Post by Barrin92 »

mattmaroon wrote: post #347
paxys wrote: 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…

Or, and I know this is a radical idea, but I think it could work, sell the hardware for more than it costs to make. I’m pretty happy with having a speaker in one of my room that can play whatever I want, all at the same time, and some basic assistant functionality. If they cost twice as much, I would still buy them.

>sell the hardware for more than it costs to make.

That probably won't work because, at least according to Wikipedia, at some point 10k (!) people worked on Alexa. I'd start at the other end, maybe don't hire an entire Death Star worth of people to develop a voice assistant. That'd probably have saved a few billion here and there.

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

#534

Post by skydhash »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #331
textlapse wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. How much would one have to pay you to stop using it? Wondering what the use cases are (replace Google? Stack Overflow? etc).

I'd have to be paid probably at least $200/mo to stop using LLMs, they are a massive productivity boost for new projects and can replace google for simple things. As an example of replacing google (since I was writing C++ today and I haven't used it in ages): me: is there an issue with passing "hello" to std::string claude: Passing "hello" to a function expecting std::string is actually not an issue. C++ allows impli…

Not arguing with your anecdote, but I expect LLMs to respond better with question type queries. Due to learning with books, I tend to use a keyword based to my search, and while reading I tend to collect technical terms as that how they will be referred most of the times. As for your example, I would type "c++ string literal std::string" as the query. Or I'd probably look for the documentation of std::string and seek the answer there.

Why? Because books, articles, and documentation often have related pieces of knowledge next to each other. It's like experiencing a whole journey instead of a short slideshow of pictures and video clips. Maybe that one specific answer is all you needed, but having the complete picture helps me refine my ideas better.

DuckDuckGo (What I use) is still useful for me. I either know the resources I'm looking for or I'm hoping someone has written about it. And the keyword based approach works great. It's like the index at the end of the book and it's table of content. You look at them to see if what you're seeking in in this book and where. It's just a short stop to the actual information.

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

#535

Post by lazylion2 »

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…

My Google assistant is 90%+ alarms and timers

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

#536

Post by wodenokoto »

paxys wrote: 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 think that could work, but not on Amazon. Their prices are all over the place. I bought a textbook, new on Amazon. Sold by Amazon, dispatched by Amazon. $30. When looking at that same listing it is now $90.

I don’t want Alexa to buy me a new bottle of my shampoo when it can be $10 one week at $50 the next.

But from Walmart or Target? There’s a price stability where you can basically go shopping without looking at the price tags. A price of a toilet roll won’t explode because of some price algorithm fighting each other.

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

#537

Post by 14 »

philodelta wrote: post #152
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…

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 bought a kitchen sink faucet that has a sensor and you just wave your hand in front of it and it runs the water and wave again and it stops. It is such a good feature I never realized I didn't have. Dirty chicken hands no need to touch the handle before or after. Pump the soap with my forearm and clean my hands.

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

#538

Post by toasterlovin »

ryandrake wrote: post #300
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…

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…

Their search result page is just a ranking of whatever they predict will sell best based on your query (based on units, not dollars). It’s stupidly simlistic, actually: if we sell more for a given search term because we’re advertising hard on that search term, our organic ranking for that term will rise almost immediately. So in your case, what’s going on is that basically other people who search with the same term end up buying other products. Thats bad for you, but perhaps its actually good for them?

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

#539

Post by chamanbuga »

IMO Alexa is just a bad product, which Amazon thought scale scale scale instead of finding value and product market fit. So many things that it does is better than predecessors, but overall is subpar and didn't get better over time.

Ex. Music. Bread and butter for Alexa. Conversion opportunity to Amazon Music. Conversion opportunity for podcasts, news, so much... Try asking Alexa to play new music, something different, slow jazz, I didn't like that song, play something like blah, etc... Most of these queries do not work. It's such a POS.

Ex. Proactive notifications. Alexa routinely informs me that diapers or something else from my routine purchases is likely running out and I should refill them. I've used this feature 100s of times in the 7+ years I've owned Alexa. I'm sure the LTV I've given Amazon is hell a lot more than most Alexa users. That being said, I can get so many more recommendations than just the 1-2 things in my routine purchase history.

I could go on and on. Ultimately, like many products by large companies, Amazon had a product that received early success because of novelties like hands-free music, alarms, timers - but never found more utility beyond that. Instead of doubling down on discovery, they worked on scaling out the platform and opening it up to 3P developers. The platform they exposed was limited in frustrating ways, and ultimately did not help them discover any hidden gem skills.

IMO the smart home virtual assistant is ripe for easy disruption. Throw out Amazon's model and use ChatGPT / Anthropic instead. Keep the 3P plugins. This fusion would be a sufficiently better product than what's in the market today.

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

#540

Post by chamanbuga »

ihkasfjdkabnsk wrote: post #390
asdasdsddd wrote: post #350

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).…

This is exactly how Cortana and Google Assistant have been built as well.
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