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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

#821

Post by LorenPechtel »

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…

I believe an awful lot of it is due to allowing third party sellers.

And I think a lot of it is third party sellers uploading their catalogs without trying to sanely de-dupe it vs what's already there. And Amazon certainly doesn't help in how they organize their search results. Please give me a simple size and quantity separate from the description. So often I have to open up a bunch of entries because the description is long enough to push that off the summary you see on the search page.

I also think there are a lot of entries on there where the main objective is to get accidentally grabbed when the main supplier is out of stock.

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

#822

Post by LorenPechtel »

bombcar wrote: post #687
ssl-3 wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, but different. I once ordered qty. 6 bananas from Instacart, expecting one fairly-medium bunch of bananas to show up with about 6 fruits in that bunch. The listing clearly showed that it was for "quantity", not "weight." But I got 6 pounds of bananas, which is a ton for a single person living by themself. [And I don't bake, so I got plenty of fresh potassium that week.] It only happened once. After that, I star…

It’s not only Instacart. The first target that I ever went to that had a grocery store had turkeys that had been labeled at $.25. Not $.25 a pound. I pointed it out to the cashier multiple times and she couldn’t understand what I was complaining about so eventually, I went home with my $.25 turkey.

I've seen fixed-price turkey before. But not 25 cents.

On the flip side, many local places have gone to pricing bananas by the each.

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

#823

Post by nerdponx »

gregw2 wrote: post #661
nerdponx wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When money is at stake, never attribute to incompetence what could be attributed to greed.

Nice twist on the incompetence version of Hanlon's razor... does it have a name? "Nerdponx's razor" will have a hard time catching on... EDIT: I see esmifra on Reddit said this six years ago... but not sure "esmifra's razor" would catch on either. https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/8itqf5/comment/d... And I see there is a similar but less catchily-worded concept, "Hubbard's corollary" from 2020 mentioned in…

I actually thought I made it up, and almost called it "Nerdponx's Razor", but I thought it would be arrogant to name it after myself. Hubbard can take the credit!

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

#824

Post by smt88 »

fuzztester wrote: post #813
smt88 wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Again, no one buys things using only such an interface. I am middle aged and have never done, not even in pre-e-commerce times. It is a non-existent behavior, and there was no reason to think Alexa could will it into existence.

>Again, no one buys things using only such an interface. I was talking about future possibilities, not the past. I would have thought that was clear from my comment. but maybe it was not worded clearly, or maybe you didn't get it. >I am middle aged and have never done, not even in pre-e-commerce times. you are not the same entity as everyone else. you are one, they are numerous. just the fact that you have never done…

> I was talking about future possibilities, not the past.

Why would anyone want to do an audio-only interface? If there were a need or desire for it, it would have popped up somewhere else in society. It hasn't.

> you are not the same entity as everyone else. you are one, they are numerous.

OK, let me rephrase that. I've never heard of a single other person buying a single thing using an audio-only interface. It probably happens, but it's rare enough that it's safe to say Amazon was trying to invent a brand new human behavior, which (I will reiterate) is stupid.

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

#825

Post by LorenPechtel »

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…

Fundamentally, Amazon seems to have a problem with not understanding priority. It's especially terrible at associating numbers with units. While I have no access to how Amazon actually works I think it's just counting matches and thus "sprayway glass cleaner 19 oz 1 pack" and "sprayway glass cleaner 1 oz 19 pack" would score equally and "bogus glass cleaner 19 oz 1 pack" would score higher than "sprayway glass cleaner 19 ounce". Remember, most quantity 1 items will not say so in the description, "1 pack" is asking for trouble.

I think the only real fix here would be for Amazon to separate out brand, product, size (or sizes in a few cases) and quantity. And the parser needs to attach numbers to the following word if that word is a unit word.

While I've never done it at any real scale I have done a routine that predicts what's related to what. It required giving it a fair understanding of the data (for example, Xabcde is probably related to X despite the distance between them) to get it to quit spewing out whoppers. It's hard even in my case where I could afford to run the test against all reasonable candidates. Amazon simply can't do that. (My routine runs in length * length * table size. You simply do not implement anything that even resembles O(n^3) at scale.)

Trying your search, I'm not seeing a pile of crap.

First hit differs from your search term only in 2 vs 1. I believe Amazon doesn't consider numbers as as much of a mismatch as other things.

The third hit is obviously what you want, but it doesn't have the commas and the unit is "1 pack (packaging may vary)". Apparently that makes it score slightly less. Going down the page I find it in 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 packs, fresh scent vs unscented and there's also "blue". There's one clear typo of 15 oz, and you get a bunch of things where it's a multi-pack bundled with some other cleaning item.

Farther on down I start seeing different sizes and related products. Is there any harm to it displaying lesser matches farther on down??

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

#826

Post by conductr »

nickm12 wrote: post #528
conductr wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, it’s just how I remember it. It was a period of time, not a moment. A bit longer apart than i remembered but that phase of amazons management and growth felt like a cohesive moment to me as an outside observer. Their strategy has changed since then. And have they released much new tech that wasn’t expansion or iterations of those?

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

#827

Post by slumberlust »

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.

Ironically, doesn't AMZ Seattle supply bananas freely to all staff already?

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

#828

Post by stacktrust »

mgraupner wrote: post #582
stacktrust wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's not doing what you want, you can remap any arbitrary voice command to a precise Volume setting in 1% increments, via a custom Routine.

Which is fine (although these routines are very slow, which makes it awkward to use for volume adjustments), but why make things so complicated when the possibility to adjust the volume in 1% steps via the app and 3% via buttons exist?

Misguided "simplicity" is the bane of modern UX.

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

#829

Post by rtpg »

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…

I am confused as to why it's more undiscoverable than, say, some LLM.

> 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 randomly try stuff 95% of the time it won't work. Users learn that very quickly and end up sticking to the few commands they know work.

This is not strictly true. Context free grammars can be written to handle (finite) sentences of arbitrary length! if you have a rule like "play me " and then can be "a song that lasts longer than X" or "a song by " (then you have be "" or "some German singer" or whatever....). You can just keep on going.

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

#830

Post by sebastiennight »

bombcar wrote: post #695
sebastiennight wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to book a small-group (~12 people) conference room at a US hotel and when I asked for a flipchart, they added "resort fees" and a $200 staff "service fee" to bring the flipchart into the room. This was on top of renting me the flipchart for $107 for 6 hours.

This is just how hotels make money. The key is to be very nice to the person who actually brings out the flipchart and asked for it on site. Then it’s on them to actually record that they did it and you know what people are lazy enough and failed to record it.

Thanks for the tip, I'll try it next time! I mean even if I had to tip a $20 I'd still be saving a few hundred
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