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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

#671

Post by brightball »

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…

Did they stop letting developers build skills or restrict it somehow?

A friend of mine used to be very into that but he seemed to sour on the experience last time I talked to him.

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

#673

Post by 9dev »

IshKebab wrote: post #610
rtpg wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this not actually kind of powerful? Having linguists write up a bunch of rules seems a lot more predictable than "rolling a bunch of dice and hoping that some LLM spits out a coherent set of steps". It feels very fractal but on the other hand if Alexa has only a specific gamut of responses it's not exactly a limitless state space right? Very curious about how those rules look like though

The problem is it's completely undiscoverable. You can tell Alexa "play some music" because you're pretty sure one of these linguists added a rule for that. But can you tell it "play me a song that lasts longer than 5 minutes"? Doubtful. The only way to know is to try it. The problem is the space of possible commands is waaaaay bigger than the space of commands you can manually handle, which means if you just randoml…

> The one exception is "search" queries - "how tall is Everest" and so on, but that only really works well on Google's platform because they've done all the work for that already.

Had a small Google Assistant thingy for years, and that search stuff works great, until it doesn't, and completely misses the mark. This immediately kills trust and reduces it to a gadget that I will only use for non-critical stuff, always expecting it to break anyway.

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

#674

Post by kcartlidge »

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.

> retail customer experience and return policy is unmatched ... make it suck like Europe.

Maybe it's great in the US, I don't know, but it far from sucks in Europe. Amongst other things for returns policies you have a guaranteed 14 day return period for online orders even if there's no issues. Plus there's a minimum 2 years warranty, and a few years more if there's a reasonable expectation for the item in question to last longer. I'm not seeing the issue.

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

#675

Post by ta1243 »

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…

> Alexa can set timers and tell me the weather, and...that's basically it. Make it a value add in my life and I wouldn't mind paying a subscription fee for it.

I wouldn't. Amazon wouldn't be able to stop them selves double-dipping like they did with prime, throwing in adverts etc.

Subscription models were fine, until they weren't enough to keep big tech growth placated.

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

#676

Post by ta1243 »

derefr wrote: post #413
jprete wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to your point, one can't even pick out a brand-name product directly from Amazon's website and be sure of getting the real thing.

These days, you can't even pick out a brand-name product from a brick and mortar store and be sure of getting the real thing. People will buy something from a store, buy a fake version of that thing on AliExpress, swap the fake into the box, re-shrinkwrap the box, return the shrinkwrapped fake to the store, and sell the real one on eBay. The store will often put the thing back on the shelf, because it's still shrinkw…

> People will buy something from a store, buy a fake version of that thing on AliExpress, swap the fake into the box, re-shrinkwrap the box, return the shrinkwrapped fake to the store, and sell the real one on eBay.

Why not just sell the AliExpress one on ebay?

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

#677

Post by cschmidt »

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…

Cory Doctorow has a good blog post explaining why Amazon is so bad. Amazon is now an ad business

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-monopoly-enshittified-amazon...

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

#678

Post by 9dev »

emj wrote: post #165
sethhochberg wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like my Apple Watch for other reasons, but do have to admit that raising it to my face to set a timer or do a quick unit conversion while cooking is by far the most common "active" way I use it. I also use voice control a lot for music when I'm wearing gloves while working with greasy bicycle parts or when gardening. An entire product segment for when your hands are dirty...

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.

It's a real problem for all countries not using the metric system, so, uhhh... the US, Liberia, and Myanmar. If the units have no meaningful way of conversation, like gallons, ounces, pounds, cups, and so on, cooking can get hard.

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

#679

Post by sebstefan »

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…

They need to make money through an associated line of Alexa compatible products, like smart bulbs, door bells, phones, window shutters, ...

It would be very hard to convince me to buy another subscription for something like Alexa. They would be competing with all the other Big Tech subscriptions I'm paying and that budget is limited. There's only space for a few of those before any new ones become a very tough sell.

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

#680

Post by ghaff »

parpfish wrote: post #550
StressedDev wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Retail is extremely competitive. Amazon does not have the best prices, and has a horrible experience for shopping. It's basically a specialized search engine with lots of ads at this point. Also, the things which made Amazon shopping a no-brainer are gone. Items no longer always arrive within two days if you have Prime, there are lots of poor-quality items, and it's hard to find what you really want. Finally, it's ob…

I think an under appreciated part of their most is that people hate logging in to things and making new accounts. I know there have been times where I see a product is a little cheaper on the actual brand website but I decide to just order with Amazon rather than creating an account to place a single order on the other site. I tell myself that it’s about privacy and minimizing exposure to future breaches, but really…

For me it's just about time and laziness. I accept for large and specialized purchases, it's worth potentially going to someplace else to buy something. But for some run of the mill $20 item? I probably spend a few minutes on Amazon and call it a day. I usually get the item in a day or two and, if I don't? It's still probably faster than I would get it elsewhere and it probably doesn't matter.
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