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

621–630 of 871 posts

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

#621

Post by emj »

mschuster91 wrote: post #250
emj wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one need unit conversion while cooking? Sometimes I need how many grams is 1 dl of flour/oats (60g/35g) but I memorized that the second time, maybe if you are doing larger portions.

Everyone who routinely tries to cook American or British recipes, for example. It's all "tablespoons", "cups", "ounces", "fluid ounces" (whoever thought about naming that one deserves a special place in hell...) and whatnot. And since that stuff isn't metric, orders-of-magnitude conversions (e.g. scaling a recipe up/down) become needlessly more complex as well.

That is probably it, never would have occurred to me. When doing international recipes doing a translation/conversion is not always straight forward. I cook a lot and often it becomes a investigation into the ingredients and what to replace rather than a simple conversion of units. Not something Alexa does.

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

#622

Post by hereonout2 »

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.

Yep, it's these simple thingsthat are actually the killer features for me. Alexa is so cheap too (often given away free with other products like ring cameras) that I have them in most rooms.

Mainly I just use them as alarms, timers, a talking clock and for listening to radio. I occasionally ask it what time a local shop may close or similar.

For the little money I've spent on them I'm perfectly happy using them in such a superficial manner, they make life a little tiny bit easier and that's ok.

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

#623

Post by frameset »

pmontra wrote: post #619
regularfry wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's malicious compliance. They probably wouldn't show anything other than the pack price if they had a choice, so there's something forcing them to show unit prices. So given that they have to show them anyway, they have an opportunity to inject profitable confusion. Non-metric units are just icing on the cake.

I remember that around year 2000 a coworker from England told me that petrol pumps changed the prices from pounds per gallon to pounds per liter when the cost crossed the one pound mark. There is some malice in that too. Something like that could be the origin of using different units in those USA shops, not to cross some psychological threshold. It's been a long time since I went to the UK so I can't say if petrol i…

Petrol is around £1.44 a litre at the moment, varying a bit geographically.

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

#624

Post by emj »

crazygringo wrote: post #310
snapcaster wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You answered your own question in the comment? If you require two instances to memorize it that means you needed unit conversion twice in cooking

Exactly. And given that there are probably 50 different common conversions you'll encounter in cooking, both between imperial units and between imperial and metric, not to mention common weight-vs-volume conversions of things like flour, good luck in not only memorizing them all but getting them exactly perfectly right every single time . You mess up a single conversion and your finished baked goods go straight in th…

I do not understand how a voice assistant help with this, it has never worked for me. Seems like pretty hard things to do on the fly with recipes.

Weight to volume conversions are rare here but sure I do those on the fly so I guess it makes sense, do you really do you guys really do it that often? If you do extensive conversions of recipes you will need to get the ratios correct as well it is just not something I see myself doing with a voice assistant.

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

#625

Post by prmoustache »

sholladay wrote: post #572
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…

This seems like such a solvable problem. It only requires some profile setup. Take the most commonly re-ordered items on Amazon (paper towels, toothbrushes, etc) and have the user select a preferred product, brand, and fallback for each one, as well as a maximum price. Some of that is already implemented for Subscribe & Save and Whole Foods delivery/pickup orders. They could even leverage that existing system. For le…

Nobody wants to go through building a list of common items. I would just leave the door and come back with my toilet paper, bought from the shop, 5 minutes later.

Also I don't understand that "let's order household stuff" online randomly and individually example. Sure sometimes you run out of something but I think it mostly happens to people like me who live in small places because we don't have the space to have 3 packs of 6 rolls of toilet paper. But usually people who live in small spaces are usually the ones living in high density places where small groceries shops are always available at walking distance. People who live in suburbs usually have enough storage space and do their shopping of houshold items once a month and never run out of anything.

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

#626

Post by rickdeckard »

crazygringo wrote: post #210
swatcoder wrote: post #100

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…

To be fair, Amazon didn't create this. Even supermarkets position products at different height to steer their sales, and the majority of customers grab the laundry detergent from the mid-shelf with the most sensational pricing-tag.

A specific book is also a far more unique product than i.e. "laundry detergent".

To be comparable, you would have to compare laundry detergent to a genre of books, and maybe also the publisher.

And then the absurdity of some of Amazon's "Smart Shopping" strategies becomes quite obvious: Is there a market for an Amazon Dash-button that blindly ships i.e. a "fiction book from Penguin publishing"...?

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

#627

Post by emj »

chankstein38 wrote: post #218
emj wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one need unit conversion while cooking? Sometimes I need how many grams is 1 dl of flour/oats (60g/35g) but I memorized that the second time, maybe if you are doing larger portions.

Some people might just not want to take the time to math it out while they've got something time-sensitive on the stove. I feel like your comment doesn't really serve a purpose other than to put other people down. Congrats on your memory and math prowess but not everyone in the world has the same brain as you.

I wanted concrete examples, I see I could have been clearer on that point but I did not intend malice or to brag.

I memorize because of diabetes. You need to know how much sugar you eat so you do volume -> weight * carbs/weight * portion size to calculate how much insulin you are supposed to give for a meal. That is not because of cooking and having tried doing that with voice assistant several times I know it is hard to get correct numbers.

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

#628

Post by rickdeckard »

asfodelsu wrote: post #611
xp84 wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unit price labels here in the US are hilariously messed up. The items you want to compare will be say, a pack of 6 granola bars or a 10 pack. The unit prices will be like: #1: $0.37 / ounce #2: $6.50 / pound or even: #3: $1.82 / each (a price per item) This will even be common within the same exact brand too. The stores seem so bad at picking a consistent unit for a product category that it seems malicious, but i…

In many places in Europe: Normal price per item big letters, price per Kg small letters. Problem solved

Comparable unit-pricing: A mandate brought to you by the European Union. You know, this allegedly evil entity that always hassles with the free market and annoys global companies. /s

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

#629

Post by iam-TJ »

pmontra wrote: post #619
regularfry wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's malicious compliance. They probably wouldn't show anything other than the pack price if they had a choice, so there's something forcing them to show unit prices. So given that they have to show them anyway, they have an opportunity to inject profitable confusion. Non-metric units are just icing on the cake.

I remember that around year 2000 a coworker from England told me that petrol pumps changed the prices from pounds per gallon to pounds per liter when the cost crossed the one pound mark. There is some malice in that too. Something like that could be the origin of using different units in those USA shops, not to cross some psychological threshold. It's been a long time since I went to the UK so I can't say if petrol i…

The change-over was actually driven by the technology at the time - namely the outdoor road-facing price advertising panels, as well as many of the pump displays.

Simply - they were only designed to show 2 numbers so when the price-per-gallon exceeded 99 pence many had to stick a static "1" in front, and many point-of-sale terminals and cash registers couldn't handle it.

Since there are ~4.5 litres in a British gallon displaying pence-per-litre brought the displayed prices back to 2 digits and allowed for a gradual transition to 3 and 4 digit displays.

And yes, at the time the switch from pence-per-gallon to pence-per-litre occurred some retailers did take advantage to 'add some profit margin' but it wasn't universal.

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

#630

Post by rmccue »

rconti wrote: post #380
harmmonica wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agree with this and we're an alexa household, which I don't love, but we tried a homepod and friggin' siri was (still is?) shockingly inept when it specifically came to setting multiple timers, adjusting timer duration, cancelling timers, etc. it feels pretty dumb having Alexa and all the potential snooping just to set timers and for an inferior Spotify-playing experience (sound quality of the ones we have are not go…

My Sonos Era 100s have the alexa integration and have my spotify account linked to them. You just gave me an idea! ... except, my Sonos Roam responded, and started playing. Not my stereo pair of era 100s on my desk. Let alone all the speakers in my house. tried again. "I didn't find anything called "office speakers" in your music library". To be fair, she suggested setting up multi-room in the alexa app, which I supp…

Sonos Voice Control is better for any multi-room control, and it seems to work near flawlessly - probably because of the small domain it operates in.
Post reply on HN