The inside story of how Amazon created Echo

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-inside-story-of-how-amazon-created-echo-2016-4?op=1

by davidst • 10 years ago

105 47 10 years ago

jkraker• 10 years ago

summary: Bezos may or may not have established a requirement for the 1 second response time, Amazon did a bunch of testing to craft responses to common questions, Bezos wanted to make sure it wasn't seen as just another music device and it may eventually make Amazon $1 billion.

I had hoped for a bit more detail.

deanCommie• 10 years ago

What were you hoping to get at this early time in the product's lifecycle?

Most companies aren't Apple with their short-film-about-every-new-product approach with interviews and sexy renders.

studentrob• 10 years ago

A run down on the tech and some key employees credited with contributions would've made it more interesting for me. Something a little more than Bezos + 1 second. This article sounds a lot like the Jobs hating ones, just from a positive perspective.

Anyway Bezos has obviously already done tons for Amazon. The article does nothing to boost Amazon's image and it's a weak attempt at boosting Jeff's.

anonymouse123453• 10 years ago

Also, not an article with a lot of on-the-record comment from Amazon (as is typical), so you're not going to see a lot of citable or confirmed detail.

anonymouse123453• 10 years ago

(1) Yes - after reviewing much internal and comparative data (2) Yes - lots and lots (3) Yes - he's not a huge music fan (4) Easy speculation, but probably yes given ASP and likely units sold

source: physically present in many meetings in which first 3 were discussed, debated, and decided.

rdl• 10 years ago

Does he like audiobooks? Audible integration is one of my main loves about the Echo -- I own 3 of them now. There are some minor tweaks which the app could use ("end-of-chapter sleep" being the main one, and maybe a go-back-5m on top of go-back-30s, and an auditory representation/readout of how far into a chapter/book/etc. you are.)

galistoca• 10 years ago

I don't think him being a non-music fan has anything to do with him not wanting it to be seen as just another music device though. IF what you built enables things that weren't possible before, you probably don't want it to be associated with already existing products in a crowded market.

spark3k• 10 years ago

Jeff Bezos' marketing arm at it again. Notice that the Tesla Model 3 was the hottest news of the weekend and only got a tiny Business Insider article?

catwithribbon• 10 years ago

Without trying very hard I found 4 Business Insider articles about the model 3 published in the space of 2 days, including 3 different articles about the model 3 published in one day...

http://www.businessinsider.com/here-is-the-tesla-model-3-201...

http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-everything-we-know-abou...

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-model-3-is-teslas-biggest...

http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-stock-model-3-2016-4

Amusingly one of the comments under one of those articles even accuses BI of having a "lovefest" for Elon.

matwood• 10 years ago

I hope your comment was missing a /s, because you cannot be serious thinking that Tesla was not all over every news organization.

p4wnc66• 10 years ago

Is echo a profitable business unit for Amazon?

I don't know a single person in my extended network, ranging from elderly family members to colleagues and tech professionals, to my teenage sister's cohort, who considers it anything but an obnoxious idea. I've actually made a point to try and ask people I know about it without sharing my opinions with them first, because I earnestly want to understand if people want these kinds of devices in their homes.

Though the sample of my connections is small (N ~ 75 people), it is fairly diverse and randomized across age, income level, education, tech proficiency, and world-wide geographic location, and it has seriously been a completely uniform, 100% rate of negative opinion regarding the idea of Echo.

I'd like to see more official numbers though, to better understand where the demand does come from for it.

bigchewy• 10 years ago

Given the overall sales numbers and your survey of 0 out of 75, I think your opinions may be shining through despite your efforts to contain them. My equally anecodatal evidence is the opposite - Probably a dozen of my friends have purchased Echos in the last couple of months and almost all rave about it

p4wnc66• 10 years ago

What are the sales numbers?

eclipxe2• 10 years ago

http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-SK705DI-Echo/dp/B00X4WHP5E/ref=...

35k people have reviewed it. 4.5 star average. 35k > 75

p4wnc66• 10 years ago

I don't find this convincing in the least. Just looking through many of the 5-star reviews, several of them come from people who actively contacted Amazon to request to purchase Alexa, which gives a clear bias in favor of a positive review (someone actively looking to like it, or an active reviewer of newer tech, not really representative of mainstream users).

Many others come from the pool of "Top 50 Reviewer" or "Top 500 Reviewer" which again suffers the same problem. It's an Amazon product, so it's obviously not OK with Amazon to deride it, and top reviewers are unlikely to jeopardize their affiliation-with-Amazon status to give it a significantly negative review.

The problem is I don't know the underlying population these reviews were drawn from, and at a cursory glance it looks highly different than the kind of population whose reviews I care about.

However, I will say that one substantial sub-population within the reviews, the sub-population writing reviews related to the way Echo can be used by differently abled people, does seem to present some compelling information about that particular use case.

Other than that, the reviews don't give me much of a reason to care (about the reviews themselves, not Echo), and this is not yet even taking into account what surely must be armies of sponsored reviews discreetly coming from Amazon itself.

andersen14882• 10 years ago

Yes, everyone knows you should trust a site's own reviews for a product online.

barney54• 10 years ago

I was skeptical until we visited our friend who own one. Our friend is blind and that's why they bought it, but it was fun to use and actually useful.

qq66• 10 years ago

This isn't an unusual phenomenon at all. If a person asks their 75 closest friends whether they own a snowmobile, the answer is likely to be 0 or a lot. Nobody's friends constitute a random sample.

p4wnc66• 10 years ago

Nobody's friends constitute a perfectly random sample, but extended social networks are really good approximations of a random sample for questions like this.

Two interesting points: at least 3 people in the 75 had snowmobiles (the family of a college friend who lives in Alaska) -- but also, 0% ownership rate for snowmobiles is not a bad approximation of worldwide snowmobile ownership rate, depending on the application you're using the data for. There are a ton of applications of survey data where assuming a 0% worldwide ownership rate of snowmobiles would be a super useful and perfectly reasonable approximation. Then there are others, like say, running a snowmobile advertising campaign in Minnesota, where that 0% estimate would be terrible.

In fact, I would go a little further and say that for reasonably diverse sets of social connections, it would not be feasible to observe the effect you are saying (either a lot of people satisfy property X or none at all do) unless the property in question is extremely rare in general. Even thinking about connection data sets that are nearly perfectly clustered, like telephone connections in Belgium (which reveal structure based on whether the person speaks primarily French or primarily Dutch), it would be very, very uncommon to have zero opposite-language speakers in a 75-member sample of your network.

I definitely believe that a random batch of 75 connections on e.g. Facebook, for many people, would be perfectly adequate for getting a coarse, approximate sense of something like general interest in a mainstream tech product.

Will it have pitfalls -- of course, but absolutely no one is claiming otherwise. In fact, I am not even claiming the result is accurate. I am asking what data supports the hype over Echo. It's very strange to me that people are more interested in criticizing some openly-acknowledged-to-be-highly-inaccurate-yet-still-suggestive-of-anomaly ad hoc survey simply mentioned in a comment, rather than to actually ask what kind of data might empirically refute the sentiment of that survey.

thoughtpalette• 10 years ago

I've one, it's been amazingly fun and perfect for music and checking the weather daily. All my friends that have visited have played with it with great delight. A couple have already preordered one.

It's a great device, don't knock it till you try it.

Also, building skills is a fun way to play around with the device, and Amazon is coming out with better guides every week.

iOSGuy• 10 years ago

My girlfriend worked on it in a way, and while I thought it was kind of a silly idea we got one for the house.

I've grown to love it as the best jukebox I've ever owned. The speakers absolutely rock, and once you've enjoyed the sweet bliss of being able to tell your jukebox what to do, "Alexa, this song sucks, NEXT!", "Alex, stop!", "Alexa, play '<insert song, artist or album here>'", you'll never want another music player. <Sorry Jeff, but it really is the best feature by far, and that's nothing to be ashamed of.>

I also use it as a cooking timer, and for news in the morning. I can get a good hour out of "Alexa, tell me the news.", from BBC, to NPR, to just the weather for the day. Oh, and "Alexa, Simon Says <insert random things here>", has entertained us quite a bit.

The downsides, it's voice recognition still has trouble when multiple people are speaking, or it's already playing musc if it's really loud. (ie: outside listening to music on the Echo inside) Also, the apps for it just still aren't all that useful, the beat box was fun for about five minutes, and that's it. Possible I just haven't found the good ones yet.

All in all, it's still mostly a toy for early adopters who like to play with gadgets, but I can definitely see how it will eventually be incredibly useful. We now live in a Duplex, and I want a second one for the second floor.

guptaneil3• 10 years ago

I'm fascinated by Echo because it seems like a silly idea on paper, yet I can't stop hearing good things about it.

Genuine question: are people not concerned about the NSA potentially listening to all their conversations?

I am tempted to buy one, based solely on the rave reviews, but I'm 80% confident the NSA could hack into it and bug my home if they wanted.

Jemaclus• 10 years ago

I guess an obvious question is: what makes you think they haven't already? You have a smartphone, yeah?

More realistically, I would say that for most people, the NSA thing is a non-issue. Most of America isn't as privacy-minded as HN tends to be. I personally am not concerned about that. If the NSA is hacking into my Echo, there are bigger issues than the Echo -- namely, the NSA is overreaching. I'm not sure that ruling out an otherwise beneficial symptom of the problem really fixes the problem itself.

In other words, if you don't have an Echo, does that magically make the NSA powerless? No, of course not.

guptaneil3• 10 years ago

Great points. While I don't consider myself that privacy-minded, I have been trying to be more conscious of it lately. I suppose I trust my phone more for two reasons:

1. The public battle between the FBI and Apple gives me some confidence that my phone isn't bugged. 2. Even if it is bugged, my phone spends most of its time in my pocket or in a corner of my bedroom charging. Its microphones aren't good enough to pick up any real conversation in either situation.

The Echo is unique in that it is specifically designed to hear all conversation in a room and placed in a central location at all times.

Having said that, I agree that the Echo will not make or break the NSA. It is, however, one more potential security hole I am willingly bringing into my life. I will have to weigh the benefits to that risk. Just like I continue to use my smartphone, Gmail, Facebook, etc because the benefits have outweighed the risk, I am coming around to the benefit side of Echo's equation.

andrewguenther• 10 years ago

The hardware reportedly uses a circular buffer and is hard-coded to listen for "Alexa." Which is why you can't change the name. Buy one and tcpdump it if you want.

therein• 10 years ago

This. I just received my Echo Dot and first thing I did was to check my firewall logs since it is conveniently located behind my pfSense router. Believe it or not, it isn't listening at all times. However, that doesn't mean that there is no sleeper feature.

darksim905• 10 years ago

but Apple, Microsoft & Google take all your speech data & process it, what difference does it make if it's a company? You don't know what they do with it other than localizing it, searching, parsing it & understanding you.

serge2k• 10 years ago

seemed like more confirmation that the ecommerce giant lacked the chops to create a game-changing hardware device.

Only if you haven't heard of the kindle.

lengthy internal debates about its market appeal

something something fire phone.

andersen14882• 10 years ago

How is this any more useful than my smartphone? I'm also extremely skeptical of voice controlled anything ever catching on. It's just too awkward, no matter how good the technology gets.

Houshalter• 10 years ago

Its much better than a smartphone mic. And always on, unlike a phone you need to take out of your pocket.

voltagex_• 10 years ago

Why can't I buy one outside of the US?

greyman• 10 years ago

I suppose they are busy meeting the demand from U.S. customers, but I hope they will go international later on.

The inside story of how Amazon created Echo

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