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Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
71–80 of 378 posts
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#72I question the accounting here.
My kids use our Echo Dot to play music using our Amazon Prime subscription all the time. It's what makes me renew that subscription when it comes due.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#73The extraordinary part is they are on pace to lose $10B just this year. Even back in 2018 [1] when they started the ramp, they were losing $5B/year. So in total they have lost about $35B (avg'ing) in the past five years.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/technology/amazon-layoffs...
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#74Perhaps a silly question, but can somebody describe how they might lose $10 billion on Alexa in one year? I don't understand the math. That's enough to pay 33,000 employees $330k a year, or some recombination of such. I don't think the real numbers come even remotely close to that. So it presumably has to be hardware costs, but Alexa is software, and they have vertical integration of all servers which presumably woul…
I think the Echo devices are included, so it means hardware sold. Not sure they were being sold at a profit. Also, you need to count the server costs, including machine learning training and inference.
The Echo devices were sold for around BOM, but IIRC they were able to get some significant price reductions on that on a few popular devices, though I'm not sure if that ever got released. I think some of the newer devices might have turned a profit (not including R&D costs though).
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I absolutely concur. I think these are the creepiest pieces of spying one can have. I've never seen one do anything useful. I don't mind walking to my radio to play music and I like using my computer with keyboard and mouse to buy amazon stuff. Plus everyone's mobile device is already this anyhow.
People in the sixties: I better not say that or the government will wiretap my house People today: Hey wiretap, do you have a recipe for pancakes?[0] [0] https://imgur.com/a/27WcRjR
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Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#76I rate my voice assistants by the quality of their "animal of the day"-- by this metric, Google Home is the clear winner. It's hard to even get Alexa to play you an animal sound, while Google has a really thoughtful Animal of the Day feature with sounds and animals facts.
My toddler listens to the animal of the day at least once a day on it, comprising >50% of my overall voice assistant usage, and I love to hope that I'm a weird outlier on some confused analyst's usage dashboard.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#77What bothers me isn't just the wasted money and time. It's the opportunity cost of all of those devs not working on other stuff. Alexa pulled talent from everywhere throughout Amazon. It took up a huge portion of the hiring funnel for new devs. All of those people could have been doing useful, money-making, cost-cutting things instead. I can think of at least a dozen really brilliant devs I worked with in Amazon Fulf…
I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. The early Fire Phone team was also the early Echo team and the Echo is several orders of magnitude more successful.
Lots of services built for Alexa have been spun out into AWS as well.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#78According to the original report on Business Insider, Bezos has now moved on to backing "Astro," the $1,000 "home robot" that is supposed to patrol your house. I am not sure there will really be that much interest in this product.
That would interfere with my motion sensors.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#79> Not many people want to trust an AI with spending their money or buying an item without seeing a picture or reading reviews. I wonder how much the decline in quality of Amazon's marketplace has affected other parts of the company's business including Alexa. I remember a time when, if I wanted to buy something online, I'd just buy off Amazon without shopping around. They almost always had the best price, their shipp…
I actually started sorting price from low to high and have found the real price that way. It's interesting to see promoted items $5-10 higher than a similar product thrown randomly in the list
As soon as you do that, the product count will usually drop drastically. They don't want you to see the real list, and won't show it to you.
Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
#80I use my Alexa all the time, but 99% of it is: Alexa, time! Alexa, set an alarm for 5 minutes! Alexa how many minutes left? Alexa, turn off/on all the lights! That’s basically it. I wrote some apps for it a long time ago to do custom stuff like read me some Reddit pages, but the SDK changed or something and eventually they just died and it wasn’t obvious to me how to recreate it/not worth the effort. I really wish th…
I use Alexa for everything.
- To ask for the weather, weather alerts, relative humidity, precipitation, wind speed
- To ask about outdoor air quality, indoor air quality (requires air quality monitors)
- As a baby monitor (crying detector routine)
- To know when to empty the dehumidifier bucket (humidity > 60% routine)
- To know when someone left the AC fan off (high CO2 routine)
- To know when to open the window (high VOC routine)
- To know when to turn on the HEPA filters on high (high PM routine)
- To turn lights or on off
- To manage the thermostat temperature
- For music during lunch/dinner
- Reminder for meetings, taking out the trash, etc.
- Timers, alerts, alarms, reminders...
- To automatically turn off devices at night via smart plugs
- Vacuuming, mopping
- To locate my phone by calling myself
- Stock prices
I couldn't live without it.