Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/

by A4ET8a8uTh0 • 4 years ago

334 364 4 years ago

paulpauper• 4 years ago

so it's not just the metaverse that is bleeding money

bushbaba• 4 years ago

I always viewed Alexa as Amazon's way of enabling future re-investment of profits. The second you show w-street profit, they want it to only ever grow with future dividends. Amazon's entire model is growth over all else.

I've wondered if Alphabet's X/Waymo division operates in a similar manner. Giving future Alphabet a way to cut costs when it's growth stalls.

MBCook7• 4 years ago

It’s really too bad. There are so many companies (including Apple at this point) that I feel would be much better off if they could just announce they were going blue-chip and stop trying to grow so much every single quarter.

With Apple how long can the worlds biggest (or close, don’t know ATM) company keep growing?

So they’re doing user-hostile stuff like more ads and unnecessary subscriptions.

How many nice SaaS things had a perfect product bad had to pivot to enterprise just to find growth, ruining it in the process?

fatneckbeardz• 4 years ago

without AWS Amazon would be losing money not making a profit. its been around the financial / wsb reddit and twitter lately.

mr_toad• 4 years ago

It’s a low margin business, and Amazon have focused on growth over margins.

The popular perception that Amazon rakes in massive profits is some sort of folk wisdom.

fyrepuffs• 4 years ago

Not surprised by this in the least.

MBCook7• 4 years ago

I’m not surprised it’s losing money. I would have been surprised if it was making money.

But I am surprised it’s losing it this fast.

abudabi123• 4 years ago

Would be interesting to know the point at which return in utility petered out from zero to $100 Million to $10 Billion.

gumby• 4 years ago

This is wonderful news.

My gf has one in her living room. It is only used to play music, set a timer (usually watch is used) and adding things to a (third party) grocery list. Plus it's listening all the time to what goes on.

I had one alexa device: a scanner that would read a barcode and add it to a shopping list (or you could talk to it -- ugh, had to keep it in a drawer). It was handy as I ran out of milk to just scan it and forget about it, so that I would see "milk" when at the shop. But they discontinued that device.

kennu4• 4 years ago

I'm curious, did you actually verify that "it's listening all the time to what goes on"? The Echo devices are supposed to only turn on full power and start listening when they detect the activation word ("Alexa" by default).

cryptoz• 4 years ago

How do they ‘detect’ the activation word without listening? Seems to me that is tautologically impossible. The definition of detect and listen are identical here. How do you detect sound waves without listening to them?

pclmulqdq• 4 years ago

They tell you that they will sometimes listen when they don't hear the wake word (or hear a near miss) and report back home what they heard. It's closer to "listening all the time" than I am comfortable with.

PostOnce• 4 years ago

It has to listen to detect the activation word, doesn't it? -- therefore, it's listening all the time.

The speaker also starts recording a few seconds before a command is issued, meaning there’s likely more private information in the recordings than customers are aware of. from https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/12/18089090/amazon-ech...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/business/amazon-echo-murd...

Those two links are from two different murder cases for which Alexa/Amazon data was subpoenaed. There are probably others.

SoftTalker3• 4 years ago

Have you actually verified that it isn't?

Which assumption is the safer one?

sdfhbdf• 4 years ago

duplicate of:

Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10B this year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33700160

Overtonwindow2• 4 years ago

I think its great! It’s my alarm and does all the lights. Tells me jokes and the weather.. What more would I use it for?

revscat• 4 years ago

You can play Jeopardy on it.

oneoff7862• 4 years ago

Music player

dboreham2• 4 years ago

Also plays Downton Abbey.

elwebmaster• 4 years ago

Its jokes are dumb and boring. Amazon can’t afford to put funny jokes on it.

ncallaway3• 4 years ago

What more would I use it for?

Well... Amazon would want you to do something with it that makes them money.

mradek2• 4 years ago

Still boggles my mind that people willingly put these kinds of devices in their homes.

danielodievich• 4 years ago

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.

grepfru_it4• 4 years ago

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

visarga2• 4 years ago

Every click online is recorded and especially every search, which might be carrying more information than an Alexa command and a few random false positives for the trigger word.

JKCalhoun• 4 years ago

Device/appliance requires WiFi? Strike 1.

ranman2• 4 years ago

Then your mind is incredibly easily boggled and your threat model is broken.

danjc• 4 years ago

Ahem, your phone?

mradek2• 4 years ago

I can turn it off or stow it away somewhere, and it’s fine. Not the most convenient to do that with Alexa

manv1• 4 years ago

You could say that about any piece of technology, including the Internet. I mean fuck, the internet is in your home! It's like letting every basement dwelling pervert peek into a keyhole in your basement!

system24• 4 years ago

You can control your computer's software but not Alexa's. The internet doesn't record your home via microphones and submit to FBI:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/14/amazon-echo-recordings-jud...

bobsmooth2• 4 years ago

I like being able to control my lights with my voice and the DIY LED panel I made doesn't have a switch on it.

joker99• 4 years ago

I bought an Echo dot, opened it up, physically removed all microphones after initial set up and slapped a good loudspeaker on it that I already had. Now it's a wifi enabled spotify connect device with bluetooth capabilities. At the time, there weren't that many cheap options for my use case.

lkrubner3• 4 years ago

Having worked at startups that wanted to take Alexa into the enterprise space, I'll say that Amazon has been absolutely opposed to the idea, which feels like a missed opportunity.

Up to a point, I can admire the product discipline that Amazon and Apple (Alexa and Siri) have shown in keeping their voice products focused on consumers. But after so many years, when do we finally get voice for the enterprise? At one time, I was very hopeful about this space, see: "I believe in Enterprise software for the Amazon Echo"

http://www.smashcompany.com/business/i-believe-in-enterprise...

In late 2015 and early 2016 this space, of voice tools, was moving quickly and I thought that surely, within a year, we would see better support for enterprise applications. I was mistaken.

Here is an example of the excitement of those times: "Invoxia will allow Alexa to figure out who is speaking"

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/invoxia-will-allow-al...

At that time, it felt like we were on the cusp of using voice tools in business. There was certainly a market. For instance, https://www.jwt.com/history/ has about 9,000 employees in at least a dozen countries. They reached out to me to talk about their "Pangea" project, which was a huge internal project to better map what teams and skills and resources they had internally. I had a meeting with them in the summer of 2016 and they asked "We are thinking we could put an Amazon Alexa in every meeting room, and then whenever we need someone with a specific skill, we could ask, hey, Alexa, do we have someone at this company who has this skill?"

At that time, I told them of some of the difficulties, but I was also hopeful that things would change a lot of over the next year. I was wrong.

Among the many, many problems we faced was simply getting Alexa to recognize the names of companies, when the sound of the name did not match a standard English spelling:

TATCHA

L’Oréal

L’OCCITANE

What was needed was a way train specific conversions of phonemes to text, for both Alexa and Siri. There are a small number of tricks that are available, such as programming a glottal stop:

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/using-a-glottal-stop-...

However, in general, neither Amazon nor Apple wants to give us the tools we need, and there has been little progress in recent years.

I know that many people on Hacker News have read my book "How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps" in which we were using NLP technologies to try to allow salespeople to send text messages to Salesforce:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0998997617?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_...

As you can imagine, we hoped to move on to voice-to-text so that salespeople could simply talk to Salesforce.

It seems to me there is a wave of new startups that are waiting to move forward in this area, but no small startup has the resources to build a voice-to-text system from scratch. We need the larger firms to help set up the ecosystem, so that we can move forward in this area.

Where is the company that is going to give us the tools we need to start building great voice driven enterprise solutions?

chevman2• 4 years ago

Generally in BigCo land you need a value prop that will allow your buyer to do 1 or 2 things (or a combo) - take out massive cost, or drive large incremental revenue.

Most of the voice solutions I've seen kind of nibble around the edges of this, don't get traction, and slowly die a slow death somewhere deep in the middle of the RFP or evaluation process.

lkrubner3• 4 years ago

But this is something that enterprise customers keep asking for. I think the "pain point" is well known: companies can easily spend $10 million or $20 million customizing their Salesforce implementation, but then the salespeople hate it and refuse to use it. And then, if you are the VP Of Sales, a lot of your job becomes an endless cycle of harassing your salespeople to record their interactions with customers. This is how I explain it in my book:

-------------------

I asked him to run me through the pitch, and John gave a practiced recital:

Most salespeople are human-centered and enjoy talking with other individuals — but they hate dealing with computers. If a salesperson is selling shampoo to Sheraton Hotels, the best part of their day will be talking to the customer; the worst part will be when they have to go back to the office and deal with their company's reporting software. More likely than not, this will be Salesforce, the most widely used software for tracking sales.

Salesforce is ugly. Their interface is clunky. The poor salesperson has to sit down, bring up the website, click on a bunch of buttons, and navigate through a bunch of forms. The worst day of high school math was probably more fun for them.

Celelot aimed to change that. Instead of dealing with Salesforce, the salesperson would simply pull out their phone and send a text message to the Celelot system. For example, "Spoke to Carol. I just sold 1 million bottles of shampoo to Sheraton Hotels, rev 500,000. Contract August 1. Delivery September 1." We would use a set of computer techniques known as Natural Language Processing, or NLP, to take a message like that and pull out all the fields that were significant to Salesforce:

Contact: Carol Harrington

Customer: Sheraton Hotels

Product: Shampoo

Quantity: 1,000,000

Revenue: $500,000

Close Date: August 1

Delivery Date: September 1

Celelot would automatically identify who sent the message, connect it with their Salesforce account, and log the information in the system. Salespeople would never have to interact with Salesforce directly.

Apart from streamlining the reporting process for Salesforce specifically, Celelot could potentially become the default interface for all sales-reporting software (a category officially known as Customer Relationship Managers, or CRMs, of which Salesforce and Pipedrive are two well-known examples). That would be game changing.

LASR• 4 years ago

Are any voice assistants making any money?

The problem with voice assistants at the moment is the same as command line tools.

You have to know what specific prompts work and don’t work etc. I often see my parents make simple queries like “turn off the white lights and turn on the night lights” only to get the response that it can only do one thing at a time.

There will be a future where this gets more and more sophisticated. But in the meantime, it’s not surprising it’s losing money.

ncallaway3• 4 years ago

Even if it were more sophisticated, I don't really see how it makes money. Even if it could absolutely nail that slightly more complicated command, and manage your home automation with natural language processing... that doesn't make money either!

I agree completely with your assessment, that they behave more like a verbal CLI than a proper assistant, but solving that well doesn't seem like it offers a great opportunity for monetization.

My hope is that the open source voice assistants get more popular, and it gets easier to flash the Amazon Echo to be a satellite device for the open source voice assistant. I've looked at running the open source voice assistants locally, but the biggest barrier I had was the cost for each of the microphone/speakers. Amazon's really got the cost of those things way way down.

TulliusCicero2• 4 years ago

I could see it as a replacement for UberEats if it could get to a high level of convenience. E.g.

"Alexa, order two medium cheese pizzas from the closest Domino's for delivery."

"Okay, ordering two medium cheese pizzas from a Domino's 2.7 miles away for delivery as soon as possible, for $25. Is that correct?"

"Yes."

"Okay, ordering pizzas. It'll take around 40 minutes."

But you'd need a very high level of AI intelligence/integration to get to that level. As it stands you'd probably go back and forth a bunch of times as the AI quizzes you on exactly what you want, when you want it, from which restaurant, etc. And that would just kill the usability, to the point where it's better to just use your phone.

micah94• 4 years ago

A customer of mine has a product based on DragonNaturallySpeaking that medical doctors use for dictation. They are doing a brisk business. It's all software. No fancy hardware. For this use case, it's almost flawless. And way faster than typing. The only commands you give are related to the recording -- stop/start/playback-type commands. Not sure how sophisticated it gets beyond that. But the speech-to-text technology is pretty damn good now.

shadowofneptune• 4 years ago

The part about it being all software surprised me. All the Dragon workstations I've seen have these remote controls attached:

https://www.speechrecsolutions.com/mic_guide_handheld.html

Turns out they're third party devices. That makes Dragon more impressive than I thought.

jijji• 4 years ago

At this point in the SOTA, Whisper [0], can probably be a drop in replacement for the for-profit Nuance versions of Dragon, etc. It's even open source.

[0] https://github.com/openai/whisper

SoftTalker3• 4 years ago

Medical dictation probably follows a pretty standardized pattern? Easier for the software to work well when it knows what to expect.

8n4vidtmkvmk9• 4 years ago

my dentist inputs my tooth readings via voice while she's operating on me. seems to work well for them

SkyPuncher2• 4 years ago

Medical records, yes.

But that's not a voice assistant, that's just voice transcription.

MBCook7• 4 years ago

Siri?

HomePods aren’t sold for a loss (Apple doesn’t do that, plus price makes it seem even less likely). Macs/iPhones/iPads/etc also pay for its development.

But it doesn’t exist to make money like Alexa (why would I buy random stuff with it?). It exists to make Apple devices more sticky. And it works well for what I use it for.

The Alexa business model never makes sense to me, and that’s even if the devices were never sold at a loss, which they frequently were.

layer8• 4 years ago

Even if you know the specific prompts, it mishears you $percentage of the time.

8n4vidtmkvmk9• 4 years ago

fwiw google understands "and" but you have to use full sentences on either side of the and because it processes them as independent queries. so what you wrote ought to work but "turn off office and living room lights" wouldn't

monero-xmr• 4 years ago

My echo absolutely became less accurate month after month. Simple commands like “turn off the lights” would be 50/50. Very low-value technology and it certainly gives one pause about the feasibility of AI when something so basic with so much capital and years of effort is still fairly poor.

zachlatta• 4 years ago

I’ve been wondering if I’ve been going crazy. It’s gotten way worse for me too. I have to ask 3-4 times to turn the lights off sometimes.

diceduckmonk• 4 years ago

I’ve been assuming physical factors like dust was degrading the microphone quality

visarga2• 4 years ago

Research is going strong. The Whisper model, recently open sourced, is great for ASR and runs on the edge. https://openai.com/blog/whisper/

throwaway2203• 4 years ago

Also getting worse for me. I upgraded from my dot to a regular gen 5 echo, but no, it's still bad.

teeray• 4 years ago

Clearly, the answer is to have Alexa read a random unprompted ad every 5 minutes.

thepasswordis2• 4 years ago

It already does a form of this. You might ask it the time, and it will reply with the time and some ad telling you about other things that it can do.

It’s really annoying.

xirdstl• 4 years ago

Agreed, though fortunately it silences quickly upon “Alexa, shut up”

jahewson2• 4 years ago

Maybe it could softly whisper it, like a gentle breeze: “buy more shoooes, buy more shoooes”.

perryizgr8• 4 years ago

When I got my first echo device, it was exciting and cutting edge. Voice control was new and it worked reasonably well. A general trend with products like this is that they improve over time, and so I was happy to be along for the ride.

But it never happened. Alexa never got smarter. It still misunderstands basic stuff. You still have to use specific words for specific actions or it gets confused. You still have to maintain silence for a couple of seconds before speaking to anybody else after a command otherwise it will go into a loop of "I don't know that". It still won't play the exact song I want to.

The development experience is also extremely limited and stunted. You cannot run any code on the device, period. You can only define lambda functions that are triggered by voice. The function does not have access to anything from the device, only the spoken words.

You want to incorporate the temperature of the room using the built in sensor? No can do.

You want to know the state of a bulb or a switch? Not possible.

You want to do things on a schedule? Nope, it has to always be in response to a command.

So I'm not surprised they are losing money. They dropped the ball hard. They built an amazing thing and let it stagnate. They've steadily improved the hardware, but totally ignored the software. And software is what's magical about this. A robotic person who talks to you! This has to be pure software play. Hardware is secondary.

bigtunacan2• 4 years ago

From the article,

"Alexa was getting a billion interactions a week, but most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather. Those questions aren't monetizable."

This is mostly how I use Alexa, but those requests to play music are backed by an annual Amazon Music Unlimited subscription that I wouldn't bother with if I didn't have Alexas throughout the house.

prawn• 4 years ago

Giving away smart speakers that are used almost entirely to queue up music from an Amazon music subscription might've been their best approach. Would've differentiated a bit from Spotify and Apple Music. We use ours only to set cooking timers and play things on Spotify, and that's useful enough IMO.

Mistletoe• 4 years ago

I guess I'm surprised they didn't know this would happen? Why on earth would I shop with Alexa? All price comparisons, reading of reviews and double checking for errors goes out the window. I'm not going to say add paper towels and just trust Alexa to add the best value to my cart. The best it has ever done is remind me when I need to reorder Gatorade powder and I would have ordered that anyway when I was out.

MBCook7• 4 years ago

To whatever degree I might have ever done that, because Amazon went to the Marketplace model of putting all seller equal there are 15 duplicates of everything which may have very different prices.

Back when it was only Amazon it may have been possible to Alexa to buy some very specific thing (“buy Mario Party 23 for Switch”) but. Now I wouldn’t be able to trust even that.

So say nothing of worries about kids/guests/accidental activations ordering things.

bobsmooth2• 4 years ago

Can Alexa play music without a subscription? My Home Mini will play a radio station if I ask it for a specific band or genre without a sub to YouTube Music.

sokoloff3• 4 years ago

Yes. It’s probably the most common usage for Alexa devices in our house. Kitchen timers and weather being the other common ones.

bigtunacan2• 4 years ago

Yes, the unlimited subscription gives you access to a much larger selection of music.

thepasswordis2• 4 years ago

I 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 there was an easy way to just put python scripts onto the device or something. The process of going through Amazon is pretty unnecessarily complex and annoying.

I know there are ways of doing this stuff with raspberry pi, but also: not really worth the effort. If I cared that much I’d just make a PWA for my house and give that to my wife and kids.

ikt• 4 years ago

I really wish there was an easy way to just put python scripts onto the device or something.

Doesn't https://mycroft.ai fit this purpose?

Looks like you can ssh in: https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/mark-ii/advanced/ssh-access

and has python running on it:

https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/skill-development/introdu...

Has anyone got one though?

chimprich• 4 years ago

We really need free versions of virtual assistants, but Mycroft doesn't seem to be getting there.

It seems to be $350 (no international pricing?) which seems far too high to be realistic. More subjectively, that's quite an ugly-looking unit.

Also, not shipping till Jan? I'd be interested to see a review if anyone has managed to get one.

SkyPuncher2• 4 years ago

This has been my compliant with all of this voice control stuff.

The dev teams are so damn focused on being able to answer some esoteric query that you're asking as joke, they forget that you only want to do like 5 basic things:

* Set an alarm/reminder

* Read then send a text message (while driving). It doesn't even have to be good. Just something that I can send while driving.

* Maybe.....maybe ask for the weather.

* Turn a named household device on/off.

* Play a song

It's like these services all completely overlook the actions that you'd be taking on your phone anyways.

Chico75• 4 years ago

* Play a song Thanks to their newest Amazon Music update, they managed to break this one by only allowing shuffling unless you pay extra for Amazon Music.

grayfaced• 4 years ago

Exactly. Mine is only used for timers/alarms, weather and as a bluetooth speaker. I just want those to work reliably. Every time it tries to change my behavior ("I can also...") it is actively annoying me.

But I also recognize that my usage won't generate revenue and will continue to cost. Surely they can't just keep offering free service forever on equipment that was purchased at deep discount. But I don't think offering gimmicks is the answer to this.

saghm2• 4 years ago

Maybe.....maybe ask for the weather

I remember one time I asked my Google Home the weather to see if it was cold enough to put on a jacket, and after hearing a temperature that I was ambivalent about, I took a risk and tried asking it what the wind speed was. It started reading out the Wikipedia page for "wind speed" until I told it to stop.

rdl2• 4 years ago

I wonder how many of those could be run device-local on 2-4 year old smartphone equivalent hardware (so, something you could build today and sell for <$300 as an Echo-equivalent) with some kind of trust-minimized cloud backend (or homekit, etc. integration for local device control).

mFixman• 4 years ago

To me, the use case of Alexa is doing those exact same things _without_ having to use my phone.

Sometimes I want to listen to a podcast without risking accidentally spending the next hour on Reddit.

russfink2• 4 years ago

I believe that we are conditioned to restrict our command set based on what we know the device can do.

This betrays a spectacular failure of imagination on improving what the system can do. Show me a weather map. Show me turn by turn directions. Show me the television schedule. These are simple things that the display version cannot do.

Another problem is the clunkiness of accessing the apps. Ask foobar to tell me a joke … why not just “tell me a joke,” and remember that foobar is the preferred app to handle it? I have to remember two things. I have to remember that foobar is the app that I want, and tell me a joke is the command I must give to it.

Finally, volume control. When I ask it to turn it up, it stupidly increments it by one notch. Instead, it should take a sample of ambient noise, and pick a setting that is slightly above that. Otherwise, why would I be asking it to turn it up?

Just really simple simple things. I bet they could take 10 very smart people, that have never used this in the first place, and just watch them while they imagine all the possible things that could help around the house.

WXLCKNO• 4 years ago

Same way I used my google home.

And then one time out of 10 or something it added crap like "by the way, if you ever wanna know about blabla, you can just ask me to do blabla".

Now I don't own a google home mini anymore.

rdl2• 4 years ago

Amazon has been adding that too which makes me want to switch away (I'm already uncomfortable with the security risks of a third party controlled cloud microphone, but it's ok in my kitchen and bedroom where no sensitive audio happens.)

alasdair_• 4 years ago

I suggest putting everything you can into home assistant and relying on that, since you host it yourself. It's also far more powerful than anything amazon provides anyway.

Then, the only integration you need is Alexa-> Home Assistant, so there is only one thing that can break.

benjaminwootton2• 4 years ago

What is Home Assistant? Google doesn’t help….

29athrowaway3• 4 years ago

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.

poxrud• 4 years ago

What do you use for VOC/PM detection that integrates with Alexa?

Eric_WVGG• 4 years ago

so from the perspective of an executive trying to make money off it: utterly useless

PieUser• 4 years ago

Nah you totally could.

jahewson2• 4 years ago

Vacuuming, mopping

Please elaborate.

wikfwikf4• 4 years ago

What seems interesting to me about many of these (all the HVAC, home automation stuff) is that a device with a voice interface sort of seems like a local maximum in terms of usability. You're spending lots of time getting info from Alexa and then telling her what to change to keep the environment ambient.

I would expect that in the future, home automation does all the regulation for you without any interaction. You set up a bunch of configuration in advance, and maybe train the device a little bit initially on things like your temperature preferences (because we think we want a certain temp, but actually usually find it slightly too warm or whatever). Then you almost never have to make changes, let alone expend your executive function on deciding what instructions to give the devices.

dreamcompiler• 4 years ago

I'd love to do all this stuff too, but if the price I have to pay is an unauditable always-on listening device in my home that sends my every utterance to a server controlled by a FAANG, and which speaks verbal ads to boot, that's an absolute dealbreaker.

It's horrifying to me that anyone would allow such a device in their home. Someone gave me an Echo as a gift once. I smashed it and buried it in the back yard.

commandlinefan• 4 years ago

I could never get used to the thing. I got one for free and I went ahead and hooked it up - every once in a while I ask it to play some music, but for the most part, I'm just aware of it because my daughter has a friend named Alexa and I have to be careful not to say her name or else the Amazon device will wake up.

ars• 4 years ago

People want voice control because they see it in movies and TV.

But what they forget that the only reason movies and TV have it in the first place is because that way the audience hears what the character wants!

It's not because it's actually a better interface - because it's not!

Same with glass interfaces with no buttons - they make them because they are cheaper, not because it's better. But they look really cool, so people start to think they are actually better.

I'm sure there are tons more examples of things people think are done because they are better, but are actually done to save money or for some unrelated reason.

Maybe shoelaces that are laced inside-out. In the box they want the ends to point inward, but when you wear them you are supposed to relace them so they end up pointing outward.

jve• 4 years ago

I get your point

Same with glass interfaces with no buttons - they make them because they are cheaper, not because it's better.

But are you saying current smartphones are somehow worse than button phones? I'll pass on that. And they ain't cheaper too :)

imartin2k• 4 years ago

Same here. I love my Alexa speaker and use it several times daily — for the same use cases as you, plus asking Alexa to start music streaming. Been doing so for many years and it’s unlikely that would change anymore.

mrtksn• 4 years ago

I 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 also why Siri is good enough even though it is destroyed in a trivia contest against Google or Amazon.

Voice UI is very bad since you don't have a way to know what it can do reliably. Treating it as general artificial intelligence doesn't work because the experience feels like trying to get a really stupid person do something for you. It's much easier to do it yourself than to find a sentence structure that works for this particular request but not for others.

Voice UI is only good for basic commands that you know the device is capable of.

cuteboy19• 4 years ago

Ok Google lock the device
> I'm sorry I can't do that
Ok Google clear notifications
> Opens Bluetooth (!)
Ok Google WhatsApp call xyz
> I can't call with duo (!) yet
Ok Google restart phone
> To restart your phone <instructions>

mabbo2• 4 years ago

What 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 Fulfillment who left to go work for Alexa. They'd tell me what their team/group/org did and I'd ask "but how does that make money?" and they'd laugh. "Yeah, last year I heard we had less than a million in revenue, but hey, they're certain it'll become big somehow".

What a waste of talent.

givemeethekeys• 4 years ago

Well, we live in a free society. If someone wants a talented person to work on project X and they think that the project sucks, they can try to change teams, or resign to something that looks more interesting.

datalopers• 4 years ago

Amazon is known for spending a lot of money on ideas that may or may not pan out. At least under Bezos, that was a very critical factor to the overall success. [1]

“As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures.”

[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2018-letter-to...

rabuse2• 4 years ago

Sounds like Google too.

laidoffamazon2• 4 years ago

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.

creshal2• 4 years ago

Amazon seems to be lacking in direction much more than talent anyway. There's still no way to limit the search to products that are both in stock and ship to the country I told Amazon to use for calculating shipping rates; while the flood of Chinese scammers would be a difficult problem to solve, increasingly I can't even get scammed because I can't find anything that pretends to ship to my address.

It's really baffling how Amazon is actively getting worse to buy from, and sees no problem with it.

hinkley• 4 years ago

It’s not baffling, it’s what happens as you approach monopoly status. They’ve got enough of online sales today that they have lost the drive to get better, unless better is more money.

wepple2• 4 years ago

All of those people could have been doing useful, money-making, cost-cutting things instead.

This is how you kill a tech company: stop innovating and fall back to simple “maximize revenue, cut expenses” MBA theory

mabbo2• 4 years ago

Fine, forget putting those people to work on things that make money- have them innovate on 100 other projects instead of just this one that doesn't make money.

Amazon's innovation age is dead, imho. They are the Day 2 company that Jeff Bezos always warned about.

adventured• 4 years ago

These companies are all quasi confused about what these devices are.

Voice isn't the thing, it's a mode of interacting with the thing.

The thing is: the digital home.

Amazon is comically dropping the ball here. They have the tablets. They have the TVs. They have the reach. They have the home security division. Integrate, integrate, integrate.

Alexa is just a mode of communicating with the digital home. It's a feature of the digital home, not a monster profit product by itself.

It's like thinking a stylus is where you'll make money on a business tablet. No, it's a way to input.

A4ET8a8uTh0• 4 years ago

I sometimes wonder if companies have a plan or do things and it all just kinda falls into place. I used to make fun of Steam for the DRM part, but when combined with their Proton effort, OS and Deck all of a sudden all the crazy puzzle pieces fell into place, I started to wonder to what extent it pure chance vs conscious planning by Gabe.

I agree with your point on integration. All the pieces seem to be there already. I would not want it, but I clearly was not target audience to begin with ( and this stuff was flying off the shelf life crazy ).

MBCook7• 4 years ago

I don’t know. Steam was DRM, but they smartly saw its ability to be a platform for selling everyone’s games.

Proton/OS/deck all just seem like hedges against their constant enemy: Microsoft. That was always the existential threat to Steam, and MS made it official when they launched their store.

It’s great it worked out, but I don’t think what we have today was in any of the early plans. I think most of it came later.

But that’s just my guess.

philsnow• 4 years ago

Companies don’t have plans; individuals have plans and sometimes companies fake it because either enough individuals at a company are moving in the same direction or because there’s one or two charismatic leaders at the company driving it.

Sometimes companies don’t even have that and you get spastic, impulsive, uncoordinated, un-driven, near-net-zero movement, like a defibrillating heart.

xrd• 4 years ago

I've turned off all my Google Home devices. I hated that they were basically teaching my kids to memorize Google as an all knowing brand. Organized religions at least have a more charismatic idol than Sundar Pichai. Plus, my kids would basically fight over replaying the same song over and over again. And, of course, that's not even talking about the always-on surveillance aspect of it all.

I have a Mycroft device that I'm playing with, but for the life of me, after years of using these devices, I cannot imagine getting a lot of utility in my home life.

I do think voice activation is great in certain circumstances, like when I'm driving, or riding my bike, but the rest of it does not offer much to me.

bombcar2• 4 years ago

I really want them to allow different names, I’d rename Siri to “Goddammmit” so fast.

VirusNewbie• 4 years ago

If I could have a smart house that worked like I imagine it could, I’d absolutely pay a monthly subscription. Unfortunately I don’t think the technology is there yet.

enumjorge• 4 years ago

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 shipping was fast, and I trusted the quality of what I received. In that world, I could see myself saying my shopping list out lout to an Echo to make things easier.

But in Amazon's current free-for-all marketplace, I would never do that. Now I typically check traditional big box stores first, and only go with Amazon if I can't find what I need elsewhere.

grepfru_it4• 4 years ago

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

sgc• 4 years ago

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.

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 4 years ago

I've been trying to do that, but as soon as i sort, there is a whole bunch of unrelated stuff for pages... How do you address that?

subpixel2• 4 years ago

This. Alexa is a trust-interface. Many consumers don’t trust Amazon anymore, so they sure as hell won’t trust some bot to spend their money for them there.

I just decided not to buy an item from Amazon despite it being cheaper, because I need it and I don’t have time to deal with it being a model from a previous year or whatever the catch may be.

jvanderbot• 4 years ago

I've owned and used Alex-powered devices for a while and have never spent a dime via that infernal machine. I use it to turn on the radio, change the station, play audible books, stream podcasts, toggle lights, and get the weather.

Hell, I don't even know how to buy anything via Alexa, and the one time I tried "Order some cheerios", it never came.

Alexa doesn't even push me to order things. It does, however, push me to use Amazon Music, which is a total nonstarter for probably everyone.

ctvo• 4 years ago

Many consumers don’t trust Amazon anymore

How did you come to this conclusion?

dylan604• 4 years ago

Many consumers don’t trust Amazon anymore,

on HN.

I know many many many people that don't give one iota about the things you and I might care about regarding Amazon's "quality". All they care about is that they thing they want is available, fast/free shipping, and at a price they are okay with paying. They don't know one thing about comingling inventory, they don't care about fake reviews, or any of the other things discussed frequently here.

_fat_santa• 4 years ago

Not just Alexa, pretty much all of them. When the speakers first came out I think society was still in the "wow look at these amazing tech companies" phase. After they came out and in the years since the public has shifted their view of these companies from "oh wow look how amazing" to "oh wow look how slimey"

TulliusCicero2• 4 years ago

I find that Amazon is still okay if I already know specifically what I'm trying to order.

But browsing, yeah that shit is a nightmare.

genewitch3• 4 years ago

i like going through the black friday and "cyber monday" pages, there's usually about 60 pages of junk. I don't think i've ever bought anything. Interesting to see what amazon wants to get rid of in their warehouses, though.

threadweaver34• 4 years ago

It's not just that, it's that it has to get the details right. Even for "order post-its," it's not clear what color you want, maybe you want extra sticky, or jumbo.

aborsy• 4 years ago

I still buy from Amazon and almost never had issues. The delivery is max the following day, cheap, lots of variety, etc.

It’s an open to all market, and there are certified channels and customers reviews. Big box stores dream to replicate that.

schnitzelstoat• 4 years ago

The customer reviews are hard to tell if they are genuine though.

I still like it, as sometimes you don't really care if you get some cheap knock-off good.

But for important stuff like my monitor, television etc. there's no way I would buy them from Amazon.

lotsofpulp5• 4 years ago

It’s an open to all market, and there are certified channels and customers reviews.

How is it certified if they are commingling inventory?

thomasjudge• 4 years ago

You must live in a major metro. I live in a medium size town in a rural state, I haven't had two-day prime delivery in years. Typical minimum is about a week

vhold• 4 years ago

I really want to understand how Amazon doesn’t understand this. What is it that has them so totally blind to what everybody else can so plainly see?

xnx• 4 years ago

Once you've shopped Alibaba, you recognize that Amazon is basically is just a more expensive interface with a better return policy. just learned that Target stores will price match Amazon at the register. No cumbersome customer service process or anything.

andrewstuart2• 4 years ago

When I think "Alexa", I think "an AI to serve Amazon's interests".

I don't trust it in the slightest.

I don't feel inspired by the awesome potential to allow me to creative and fun things.

That's why its failing.

whyenot• 4 years ago

According 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.

wrycoder• 4 years ago

That would interfere with my motion sensors.

somenameforme• 4 years ago

Perhaps 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 would drive voice processing costs to negligible levels as well (and that's assuming 0 on-device caching/learning ability). And this is all assuming that the gross revenue generated by Alexa is $0, which also certainly isn't true. So I don't see where the numbers are coming from?

nindalf• 4 years ago

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.

rabuse2• 4 years ago

Also, people are expensive, and it takes them to design and program this stuff.

OriginalPenguin2• 4 years ago

For a while Amazon loved selling the smaller units for a little as a dollar (and often including several months of Amazon music for free or almost free as well).

Sell enough of these 30 dollar gadgets for a dollar and it will add up quickly.

laidoffamazon2• 4 years ago

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).

slaw• 4 years ago

This year, an employee familiar with the hardware team said, the company is on pace to lose about $10 billion on Alexa and other devices.

Creative journalism or creative accounting.

lsh1233• 4 years ago

Or both ;)

db1234• 4 years ago

To me this looks like a deliberate leak from Amazon. Why? I don't know. Perhaps a signal to wall street that more layoffs are coming to Alexa division?

thereisnospork• 4 years ago

Over billed from AWS to make that part of the balance sheet look good?

(entirely speculation)

putlake• 4 years ago

From what I've heard, AWS prices for large customers like Netflix are a lot lower than for Alexa or Amazon Retail. Netflix has the option to switch to GCP or Azure; Alexa doesn't so they don't get those discounts.

adrr2• 4 years ago

Hardware is very expensive. Alexa dot is $14 on Amazon.com right now, i bet they are selling it at a loss for that price.

Hellion2• 4 years ago

I bet that’s at cost tbh. You’d be surprised how cheap things have gotten. However, r&d and every single Alexa request costs money. So from day one, it’s losing money.

achow3• 4 years ago

2020 - It took Amazon four years to populate the world with 100 million Alexa-powered devices. It took the company just one more year to more than double that number. The e-commerce titan announced Monday that there are now "hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices" in customers' hands worldwide, a massive increase from the 100 million it announced last January. https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/amazon-sees-alexa-devic...

Annual sales ~100 million device, then losing $50/device would lead to a figure of $5 billion loss in a year. Loss of $50/device would include cost for running R&D, running factories, giving minimum guarantee to factories, and all other associated cost - marketing, customer acquisition, support etc..

So $10B loss in a year sounds in the realm of possibility.

piva004• 4 years ago

Alexa-powered does not necessarily mean Alexa devices made by Amazon though.

For example: I own a multiroom speaker setup not made by Amazon that is Alexa-enabled, all speakers could run Alexa if I had set them up for it (which I won't, ever), and they're very likely counted on this metric. I can remember a multitude of other speakers and devices with an Alexa-enabled badge on their packaging that aren't made by Amazon.

It'd be good to have hardware figures for sales of Amazon's own devices.

consp• 4 years ago

Nice numbers but don't those Alexa enabled device bring in revenue offsetting the cost and limiting the loss? Or doesn't anyone have an Amazon premium account or buy anything with Alexa on Amazon?

c7b2• 4 years ago

The article says that the hardware was generally sold at cost, though.

8n4vidtmkvmk9• 4 years ago

article said sell "at cost" not "at a loss"

b112• 4 years ago

Perhaps a silly question, but can somebody describe how they might lose $10 billion on Alexa in one year?

Amazon seems to be a very poorly run company.

So many issues with search, with spam, with listings, and here's another data point...

Just bought a laptop. Waited until it was on sale, after doing Linux compatible research.

It shows up. 3 days later, it is even more on sale. This is a product sold and shipped by amazon.com, in both cases.

I contact support, and ask for a price drop refund, as there is a $150 price difference now. Nope, guy keeps linking me to "Price match" docs. I explain, I am not comparing vs another supplier, but amazon itself.

I am told, just return the laptop and order it again. That there is no other option.

For me, there is no return cost, other than a 5 minute detour to drop it off. Free return shipping.

For them, they lose the original shipping cost, the return cost, the processing of the return, and will sell it via amazon warehouse, for a $250 price drop.

I imagine that to sell a laptop via amazon warehouse, a check that it boots, a drive wipe is done, etc.

This is indicative of a company incapable of handling scale correctly.

Yet they blather on about loss on returns! And about return scams!

And yet, I still get the laptop at the price I want.

Only an insane person would act this way, and this insane act is a weird emegent behaviour at amazon.

It's telling, to me.

Amazon === borked

Rebelgecko• 4 years ago

Amazon used to be happy to price match themselves within a month or so of a purchase, or do things like let keep a cheap item you wanted to return.

My guess is that they did some A/B testing and found that the "irrational" behavior actually saves them money. In your example, if 50% of people don't bother going through the return process they still come out ahead.

jaygreco• 4 years ago

Hah, this is hilarious. I just went through this 30 or so minutes ago. I explained to the CS person that I would in fact be saving money and carbon. “Nope”, he said, just go ahead and repurchase and return.

Insanity. It’s tripping over dollars to save pennies.

wikfwikf4• 4 years ago

Why do you assume that Amazon don't know what they're doing here?

Although you returned the laptop, the annoying process might have discouraged many others from doing so. The shipping cost and the cost of processing the return are likely much smaller than you expect when accounted for on Amazon's scale. And by making you return and re-order, they are putting the risk on you if the laptop is not the identical product, rather than taking on the costs of administering a price drop refund themselves.

Of all the things that Amazon do, analysing the game theory of customer behavior so that they can do as well as possible out of interactions like this seems like one of their biggest strengths. They certainly have thousands of skilled people working on it.

As for return scams, I would not take what they say at face value. My opinion is that they have quite sophisticated models for analysing returns, both for detection (to distinguish between the behavior professional scammers and regular customers) and economically (to decide that it's cheaper to give the latter the benefit of the doubt, let them keep returned items, etc). The only flaw is if otherwise legitimate customers start to think they can get away with falsely returning 1 in 20 items or whatever. So they 'blather on' about return scams, not because they are material to their business, but to make it clear that if you cross an invisible line, they will go from not caring about your $120 air fryer that you ended up with two of, to pursuing serious legal and criminal consequences.

samsolomon• 4 years ago

Not sure I’m buying the argument that Amazon doesn’t know how to scale. I’ve had the exact same thing happen. Price drops after I’ve bought the product and have had to purchase the new one.

I’d say that Amazon has the data to determine if it’s more profitable to give the customer a credit or have them ship and return it.

So while annoying, I’d say that scale is probably why they are doing this seemingly unintuitive thing.

HDThoreaun4• 4 years ago

They probably have evidence that enough people just drop it instead of returning that this policy saves money. Amazon employs more economics Phds than anyone but the government so I would be surprised if they hadn't studied something as fundamental as the return policy.

andsoitis• 4 years ago

How common of a use case do you think this is? How common do you think it needs to be for Amazon to invest in special logistics for this pattern (I.e. for it to be a net positive)?

wikfwikf4• 4 years ago

I don't understand the point about vertical integration. Amazon use their own hardware and services internally and AWS makes a ton of money of course.

But if you were accounting for the profit or loss of Alexa specifically, of course you would account for all the AWS services used at the price they are sold for externally.

UltraViolence3• 4 years ago

Amazon is not a philanthropy. The company needs to make money and as much of it to satisfy shareholders (who, BTW, are never satisfied).

Having spent tens of billions on something that doesn't add up to the bottom line doesn't go well with shareholders, especially when there's no prospect that it ever will.

Tagbert• 4 years ago

It is a surprising number. I assume that it also includes the development and manufacturing of the devices that they sell that use Alexa. They clearly sell those devices at close to cost. Or below?

vermontdevil• 4 years ago

Alexa, print my CV

ReptileMan• 4 years ago

Here is an idea. Use Alexa to produce next seasons of Rings of Power and Wheel of time. Can't possibly do worse than the current teams and you can save couple of billion from development.

sigstoat• 4 years ago

do any voice assistants "make money" on their own? i thought they were a combination of 1) a loss leader to keep you in the ecosystem and 2) "well we figured out how to do it, so we did"

MichaelCollins4• 4 years ago

I think in the future, products like Alexa will be simple products purchased once for a profit (not loss leaders) that do all the processing locally, not service subscriptions. I mean, do you really need an internet connection and "cloud" services to implement an egg timer you can talk to? Maybe they'll have an internet connection to check weather.gov, but that's about all that's really needed.

SoftTalker3• 4 years ago

Why do you even need to talk to a timer? Why do you even need electricity? Timers can be built from gears and a spring.

MichaelCollins4• 4 years ago

I don't use one of these. But I have heard that they're very convenient ways to set timers when you're working in the kitchen with both hands dirty, and because they support more concurrent timers than a microwave.

fbdab103• 4 years ago

I want to subscribe to your future. Everyday I see more and more devices insist they require the Internet. Washing machines, TVs, thermostats. Seemingly the market for offline devices is limited. MBAs need that recurring revenue.

lotsofpulp5• 4 years ago

Can you link a single washing machine, TV, or thermostat that requires the internet? I have never seen one.

Even my ecobee thermostat does not require an internet connection.

https://support.ecobee.com/s/articles/Wi-Fi-FAQ-Setup-Guide-...

The short answer is yes.
Even without a Wi-Fi connection, your ecobee will still function as a traditional thermostat; it will engage your equipment as needed and maintain your comfort set points.

hakfoo2• 4 years ago

We can hope for a future where the "recurring revenue" model melts down.

There's two sorts of it, as I see it, and both of them do have weak spots:

* Turning everything into a data vaccuum to sell to marketers. Something like the GDPR but angrier could pop that balloon pretty decisively, as could shifts in marketing trends if advertisers start considering tracking critically as a cost centre, rather than the current FOMO snowball.

* Unbundle bits and pieces of the experience to sell back to you on a subscription. This still feels like the data's not in yet for a lot of products.

I suspect we see it being trialed a lot with cars because so many of them are leased and therefore have a predictable trade-in life. As long as the annoying $10-per-month service comes with a three-year trial, the original lessee never needs to think about the subscription model, it more becomes an albatross to make the used car look less appealing by comparison. It's harder to pull that particular trick for other products, as their service lives vary widely. I suspect that, for example, many home appliances with a subscription would end up with a lot of angry and confused calls to support when the machine "stops working" at the end of a trial/missed payment/etc. Having to pay for that support burden and associated brand damage may unwind most of the profit the subscription yielded.

dqpb• 4 years ago

No existing company will build a truly amazing voice assistant. Because, a truly amazing voice assistant must be unbridled. Therefore, the creator will have to be someone who doesn't have business to lose if it goes awry.

returnInfinity• 4 years ago

or just wait till AGI

arbuge• 4 years ago

I 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.

MBCook7• 4 years ago

Sounds like you did what they wanted.

But I bet most people don’t. They probably use them for competing services like Spotify that not only don’t make Amazon money but reinforce the feeling of not caring about Amazon music.

I’m in the Siri world, but I’m with the other posts in this thread. 99% of my usage is simple stuff like timers, math problems, smart home, etc. stuff that just won’t ever drive anyone’s revenue directly.

npalli• 4 years ago

The 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...

bonniemuffin• 4 years ago

I 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.

nataz• 4 years ago

My toddler also loves this feature. Can confirm animal (and rocket/train/baby) sounds make up a significant portion of voice assist in my house as well.

Fun fact, if you Google voice search animal sounds on a pixel, chrome will (most of the time) serve up a whole animal sounds dashboard with pixel art.

atourgates• 4 years ago

Alexa is popular with all my kids.

The toddlers love yelling at it and getting it to play songs they like. The older ones, well, I guess do the same thing but with different songs, and occasionally Wikipedia-style quick answers.

benjaminwootton2• 4 years ago

It must be the only piece of hardware where people buy 5+ of them too. It makes me think some of the loss is on per unit sales.

They also own a “platform” in the way that Zuck is trying to do with Metaverse at much greater cost.

All things considered, I don’t think it’s been such a bad investment and I don’t see it being killed.

8n4vidtmkvmk9• 4 years ago

metaverse can be profitable if he doesn't botch it tho. infinite room for ads. more $ if he pulls off the for business angle

devoutsalsa• 4 years ago

I won’t buy a taking wire tap again until they unlock profanity mode. I seriously want it to say “The next fucking movie time is 10 o’ god damn clock. You want the tickets or not bitch?” That would entertain me so damn much. Instead I get this sterile interaction that is ok-not-great and I can’t get the device to drop even one eff bomb. Lame.

bombcar2• 4 years ago

I got Siri to say naughty things by careful instructive naming of my lamps and groups of lights.

8n4vidtmkvmk9• 4 years ago

alexa understands "where's my shit" to mean "where are my Amazon packages" to my glee.

abledon• 4 years ago

vengeance for all the poor souls named 'Alexa' having their lives go to hell

etchalon• 4 years ago

Alexa feels like a "First CityWide Change Bank" sketch, writ large.

lsh1233• 4 years ago

I like voice command but Alexa is just not that great. Simple example: there are rooms and each device (e.g. echo or smart lights switch) is assigned to a room. I have multiple echos and multiple smart light switches throughout the house. I come to a room and say “turn on lights”. I would expect Alexa to turn on lights in that room. Sound simple? Nope. Alexa replies “there are multiple devices named lights, which one do you want to turn on?” WTF, I need to spell it “turn on kitchen lights”. Why do I assign devices to rooms? Nobody knows. And the same with everything. I tried to buy something with Alexa multiple times. It’s just horrible: “buy dish soap” (whatever I bought last time, I don’t care). But no: “there 1234 dish soaps available on Amazon, which one do you want to buy?” Like I know ;)

Edit: cleanup

thisOtterBeGood• 4 years ago

The "light on in current room" works for me. Maybe you have "overloaded" the "light" name.

ahaferburg• 4 years ago

Also add "at the present time, in this version of the multiverse", just to be sure it has enough context.

MichaelCollins4• 4 years ago

Imagine if you had a human butler who was this particular with the way you asked things. Fired on the spot.

lsh1233• 4 years ago

So I tried. Walking into the kitchen, I said “light on in current room”. Alexa: “did you mean lights in the movie theater”? Why???????????

mr_tristan• 4 years ago

After timers, the #1 use of Alexa in my house: 'make a fart noise'.

We've tried to use Alexa for some games, like Jeopardy or Whose Line Is It Anyway, but it always is an incredibly buggy experience. Even just simple multiple choice games should work perfectly, and yet, a lot of the time even basic answers don't register, and the games themselves crash.

I've always wondered - stupid mobile games are dominating video games in terms of money right now. Voice platforms seem like they could do something similar, but all the platforms want to be your shopping AI or whatever. Just seems like the two worlds - voice platform and game developers - just could never get together and figure things out.

klenwell• 4 years ago

Have you tried this game?

https://playheyrobot.com/rules

ceedan• 4 years ago

All we do is ask it what the weather is going to be today, tonight, tomorrow

Nursie• 4 years ago

Not far off here -

1. cooking timers

2. fart noises

3. add X to my shopping list (used when shopping in a physical store)

4. Weather forecast

5. Turn off the tv

That's enough that I'm happy 'she' was built into our tv sound bar, but yeah, I don't think alexa is making any money from me.

russfink2• 4 years ago

When we first got ours years ago, I tried a bunch of apps. In a very short time, I became frustrated with the apps, and therefore adjusted my expectations of the device. Now, all I use it for is playing songs, adding items to the shopping list, printing the shopping list, asking where my orders are, playing the morning briefing, and occasionally asking it to solve a small computation.

I think that everyone on here, that is like you and me, is that way because we have trimmed down our expectations over time due to poor implementation.

edgyquant2• 4 years ago

This is the result of a propped up economy avoiding recessions at all cost. These large conglomerates are completely out of touch and money has been so cheap they were not really competing for or providing good services.

thehappypm2• 4 years ago

Why does everyone have an obsession with “cheap money”? You still need to pay a loan back, can reduced interest on a loan really prop up a company up? I feel like that vastly overstates the impact of interest costs on business’s bottom lines

ALittleLight• 4 years ago

Without genuine understanding voice is just a terrible method for control. I don't know what the options are or what exactly I'm supposed to say. Alexa is overly verbose too. The control feels very clumsy, though it's sometimes good enough.

I am imagining GPT-4 on the other end with a suite of controls. If Alexa could understand what I'm talking about and all of the options available to it I think it would be a much better system. I could also imagine a system that's always listening and proactively acting on my behalf without my even giving directions. If hardware advances to the point where I could run a model this size locally? That would solve privacy concerns and improve latency. How far are we from running GPT-4 on commodity hardware? 20 years?

MBCook7• 4 years ago

As someone else said, Alexa seems to be very “voice command line”. I think Google is similar, no? It can be wordy but it’s easier to parse correctly (and faster).

Siri has always tried to be more conversational (though not by too much). But that’s also probably one of the reasons it hasn’t been as expandable.

Much easier to add skills (in Amazon parlance) when the command can be “tell Foo to bar the baz” instead of trying to intuit which app you want to use based on heuristics or something.

andrewstuart2• 4 years ago

At least Bezos didn’t rename the company to “Alexa”.

krony• 4 years ago

Echo makes for a simple family “phone” for kids before they’re old enough for their own mobile.

I also created a free skill for kids to hear the daily school lunch menu. Such a morning time saver! https://github.com/jeffsheets/alexa-papio-lunch-menu

But yeah it’s still mostly a hardware solution looking for a problem

Semaphor• 4 years ago

Alexa uses here:

1. Set timer

2. Convert weird US fantasy units to sane ones

3. Play music

4. Control lights

5. Weather

6. No, I don’t fucking care about the notification of some shipment I already got on my phone and my mail.

Alexa devices are cheap. Seriously cheap. That is the main reason I have not replaced them with Rhasspy [0] yet.

[0] https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

cbayram• 4 years ago

We use Echo/Alexa to play music, games, set timers/reminders, query for information. We get annoyed with up-selling and ads when issuing commands. The proliferation of fake reviews/products on Amazon has eroded any confidence in ordering anything via a voice command. It is a lazy, shallow and ineffective path to potential revenue. It lacks vision and creativity. There are missed opportunities in creating more sophisticated multi-command workflows. Ones that do not involve peddling what Amazon is already selling.

What problems should a sophisticated home assistant solve? It should curate and offer SOLICITED services; find me washer dryer, fridge, plumber, landscaper, house/pet sitter, house cleaner, mechanic... It should present these to me visually to choose from. It should remember and be ready to automate any subsequent request for the same service. This could be done via integrating with reputable third-party providers like Angie's list, thumbtack, google flights, aggregators... Alternatively, Amazon should build reputable service provider network itself. People need goods and services. Provide a path to solicit, opt-in to targeted curated offerings/ads. As important, provide the ability to opt-out when no longer necessary. Unsolicited ads are often inaccurate, invasive and damaging noise. Earned reputation and trust is gold.

sidcool• 4 years ago

I feel Alexa and voice enabled devices were innovative products, keeping aside the privacy and other concerns. 30 years ago, if someone had told us we would have a voice enabled assistant in home that can control music, lights, door etc., they would be called bonkers. So it was a technological marvel. But the world does not run on technical coolness, it had to earn money. I have no opinion on the monetization part.

scrame• 4 years ago

huh. turns out people don't like all seeing eyes.

LinkLink• 4 years ago

This is because data isn't taxed, Alexa is prob one of the most successful data gathering operations since social networks and the patriot act. Amazon will write off a fat chunk of its taxes, and keep the millions of voice recordings and customer datapoints. Win win.

dboreham2• 4 years ago

Is it possible the person in charge of Alexa is less good at disinformation and corporate politics than their peers?

dcow• 4 years ago

I don’t know if this is a general trend or just me, but Alexa hardly gets my music commands right anymore. I tell it to play music and almost always it insists on playing something similar sounding from the younger generation’s zeitgeist… like it thinks my tastes are too old and and thinks I should be listening to more popular songs. It’s a really bizarre experience recently. Alexa used to just work and play the music I expected. Now I have to specify things almost exactly, and even then sometimes it doesn't find the music I’m looking for. Is this what it feels like to get old?

gibolt• 4 years ago

It's not just you. I was an avid Alexa user with 1 Google Home just for comparison. Sometime in 2019 or 2020, Alexa got really bad, catching maybe 50% of requests, so they all got replaced with Google devices

hateful• 4 years ago

This is because you are the product, not the customer. The customer is the record company paying to get their artists music into your ears.

I've waited my whole life for AI assistants. I remember being really excited about the promise in the 90s. But it's this is it? Voluntary advertisement consumption?

Very disappointing.

thorncorona2• 4 years ago

Hanlon's Razor -- maybe Alexa matches to the most probable match and not many people are expecting what OP expects Alexa to play?

doliveira• 4 years ago

That's very similar to YouTube recommendations, they seem to think your tastes are too peculiar and you should be dragged down to a more popular cluster.

ddmma• 4 years ago

Alexa should be included in Prime, 8$

gordon_freeman• 4 years ago

Alexa division is losing billions of dollars every year is because Bezos had this dream of creating ambient computing platform with Alexa (like in that ‘Her’ movie) where the hardware and software combination would become invisible for users like us and Alexa would able to do pretty much everything for us. Now they hired thousands of hw and software engineers to execute on that dream but so far the monetizable features are just not getting any traction from the users.

Anecdotally I can give my frequent Alexa commands for Echo here:

- how’s the weather today

- what time is it now

- turn on the TV

- set an alarm for 6am

- play 88.5 fm

- what’s Arsenal score right now.

Now it’s hard to understand how these kind of interactions can earn any money for Alexa.

pcthrowaway• 4 years ago

They probably haven't tried settings alarms to be random advertisements yet.

There's probably a market for advertisers who want their victi- ahem, audience to hear their ad first thing in the morning.

binarysolo• 4 years ago

Maybe I'm an atypical user compared to the privacy-centric HN user, but I use Alexa a bunch, have them liberally scattered throughout my house, and bought into the ecosystem of Alexa-compatible devices (Neato, Hue, Frame TV, etc.) and services (Prime Music, Spotify)

I've def been a little annoyed at it starting to ask me for product reviews and other things these days, but most of it's been low enough friction that I don't bother shutting it down on the app or whatever.

I wish Alexa was more programmable or less clunky for a casual enthusiast though, I set up a buncha things basically the first few years and slowly had it atrophy as other priorities in life took over...

hammeiam• 4 years ago

Your Alexa has started talking to you and asking you for things, unprompted?

vishnugupta• 4 years ago

I'll add little bit of context from Kindle Reader which was developed while I was at Amazon. Though I was in no way involved with it I frequently interacted with senior folks who were.

For first few years, Kindle Reader was a massive sink hole at multiple levels. There was this humongous R&D cost, hardware and software. On a recurring basis Amazon absorbed cellular data charges. Remember this was in early 2008 so cellular data charges were big and since this was the first couple of iterations of product the data sync protocol was yet to be optimised so data intensive. For example, the device would phone home every hour or so to fetch new book purchases and metadata such as bookmarks, last read pages etc., It also included a basic web browser. And finally, the unit economics of selling digital books were terrible. Because Amazon was trying to create a new habit they had to incentivise readers with discounts, even without discount they were losing about 4$/book sold.

So all in all this all seemed like a giant resource consuming operation with no hope of generating any profit. But boy did it succeed. Within about 4 years or so kindle books were outselling physical copies something like 3-1. And now I think it's not even worth comparing.

My suspicion is execs expected Alexa ecosystem to follow Kindle's trajectory of success which doesn't seem to have materialised.

creshal2• 4 years ago

My suspicion is execs expected Alexa ecosystem to follow Kindle's trajectory of success which doesn't seem to have materialised.

I think that sentence encapsulates the problem well: Kindle could succeed as a product with a very simple KPI (ramp up economies of scale until you make a profit per book sold), while Alexa has to develop some nebulous "ecosystem" that nobody is quite sure what it could possibly look like.

rg1112• 4 years ago

These two are fundamentally different. Books always existed. They are a concrete, well-defined, well-understood, ubiquitous object.

You just wanted to sell a new way towards it.

But audio-things aren't even properly defined.

tzs• 4 years ago

Voice controlled assistants also have always existed. We call them "children".

Probably most of us who were kids before remote controls were common remember changing channels and turning off lights and opening garage doors, all in response to voice commands from our parents.

pardon_me• 4 years ago

Trillions involved in Amazon entering markets one by one to dominate, their secret to lower prices being sell at a loss. Running a company for decades on loans without a need for profit is quite a force.

Amazon has fuelled the race to the bottom and it seems the company inevitably destroys its own good creations given just a short time.

insane_dreamer• 4 years ago

If they're reportedly selling the devices at cost, how could they possibly be losing $10B on Alexa? That would imply $10B spent on Alexa R&D and non-manufacturing costs, which seems like .... a lot.

And if it's "server costs for processing requests", then how come Google / Apple aren't losing $Bs on their VA systems? (Also, if no one is using Alexa then request processing costs would be low; if everyone is using Alexa then it seems there would be some return in higher sales.)

system24• 4 years ago

$10B is a chump change for a trillion dollar company.

lotsofpulp5• 4 years ago

Market cap is not relevant to cash flow concerns. Not to mention that Amazon no longer has a $1T+ market cap.

oblio2• 4 years ago

Which is frankly ridiculous for a company with a yearly revenue of about $500bn and a growth rate topping 10%, even at that scale.

yalogin• 4 years ago

Did they try buying through Alexa? I can’t understand how they made that assumption. Every good i search on Amazon gives me a long list of items that I then have to sort, filter, parse, read the reviews, make sure it’s prime eligible, make sure it is not a fake etc. Had they even tried to fuss/ something it would have been obvious.

xedrac• 4 years ago

It's like having you very own computerized phone attendant. As if I didn't get enough of that the last time I called Comcast. Except this one spies on you and injects things it thinks you should care about.

jhoelzel• 4 years ago

i actually like this. The tech had so much potential, but instead of going the way of the seatbelt, they want the way of the bezos and thus Im not even sad to see alexa go.

Please write it off, free the patents and let people who actually care about it take the helm.

Drop the money into home assistant and let them write special integrations just for you. Be -the company- invested in open source

tppiotrowski• 4 years ago

Privacy considerations aside, I switched from Alexa to Google Home Assistant because Google is a search/ML company and best poised to understand a question and provide relevant context (like Google search result snippets).

Search is not Amazon's or Apple's main business so they will have a hard time competing. (last I checked, Siri just does a Google search and provides links when it doesn't understand a question)

However, both Amazon and Google seem to sell their devices at cost with the hope of finding a revenue model while Apple charges a premium for their Home Pod. That makes the Apple approach most sustainable at this point.

menshiki• 4 years ago

I think HomePods are very different devices compared to what both Amazon and Google make. Even the HomePod mini sounds way better than anything competitors make. Many are willing to pay premium for the superior sound quality. Apple simply plays a different game. Not the one where it would have to compete with $10 echo devices.

lotsofpulp5• 4 years ago

Yes, Siri is hot garbage too, but I find HomePods worth it just for the sound quality. Especially worth it in stereo mode paired with an Apple TV in the room.

8n4vidtmkvmk9• 4 years ago

so just charge a subscription fee. i don't love the idea as a consumer but it does cost money to process my requests and keep training the devices. if it means they stay ad free and don't shut down the service, it seems reasonable. package it with Ring or something and/or Prime

herghost• 4 years ago

I never really understood the use case, despite people I know wildly effusing the benefits.

I have a google smart speaker thing precisely because it's the only device that I can integrate with my Nest cameras and devices (which I bought before the Google acquisition). It does 2 things: 1) announce door bell ringing, and 2) play Apple Music in my office.

For everything else Siri, whilst demonstrably behind the curve of Amazon and Google, is perfectly functional - dictating short messages whilst walking, adding to a shared shopping list, setting timers.

I already have the phone for other reasons, there's no use case for buying an Alexa device that I can see.

I would never make a purchase from Amazon on an Alexa using my voice - there's simply too many variables that I can't control for. It might misunderstand (possibly catastrophically costing me a huge amount of money and inconvenience), the quality of goods on Amazon is too low and generally too variable to allow a an Amazon AI to be the arbiter of which product to buy for me, and even the manual purchase process changes too often and too subtly to have confidence that it won't add something that I don't want (i.e., a regular subscription to a product, pay on a credit arrangement, etc).

cromka• 4 years ago

adding to a shared shopping list

This hasn't worked for me since iOS 13, I think, and macOS, too. Getting a "Sorry, can't help with that".

rawoke083600• 4 years ago

I know the amount of Alexa-devices are "numerouse" but not sure how they count those ? Do they include my ASUS router that is Alexa-enabled but not active?

I was really excited about Alexa at first, but when I tried it on a day to day basis the biggest issue I had was "Amazon knows too little about me, compared to Google". I know right ! How horrible is that.

But consider, Alexa didn't know what i like to listen to music wise, didn't know my favourite tech topics or news websites. It had almost zero history on, even though I have bought probably about 20 books in the last 10 years and from Amazon.

deafpolygon• 4 years ago

Alexa's value is not in the device itself, but the fact that said product (Alexa, and Alexa-powered, et. al.) is in over 100 million homes. The value is in mining that data at some point in the future.

Amazon is familiar with employing that strategy, and it hopes to make it pay off again.

pflenker• 4 years ago

We're heavy Alexa users. Since we are a family, the #1 use case is of course farting noises, but other than that, we use it to: - Set ourselves reminders - Manage the family calendar (reading out of reminders, reading the calendar, scheduling and rescheduling events) - Manage the family todo list - Manage the shopping list - Read out weather information including rain, to help us decide on what to wear outside - Some of my kids can't read yet, for them it's easy to use Alexa to start their own favorite audiobooks - Games - Answering trivia and animal noises - Manage the temperature in all the rooms of our house

I also heavily use a routine that reads out the weather forecast, upcoming appointments and the latest news.

rhuru2• 4 years ago

Our biggest use was orgasm sounds until it got shut down. :(

maximedb• 4 years ago

What kind of games do your kids play on Alexa?

rajnathani• 4 years ago

Duplicate thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33697469

UltraViolence3• 4 years ago

Besides not being monetizable I refuse to have some spy microphone in my home which sends all my conversations to Amazon Central.

The market penetration is therefore finite, limited to geeks and early adopters. I'm somewhat surprised they didn't consider profitability more thoroughly when they started with Alexa. It must have cost them $100 billion by now.

philjohn• 4 years ago

I think you're assuming you are part of the majority - you're not.

"Something that makes my life easier! Cool!"

UltraViolence3• 4 years ago

In my entire life I've only met a handful of people who had a "Smart Speaker" (Alexa, Google Assistant or HomePod).

People don't see any value in it. And some technically inclined acquaintance will probably point out that the thing records everything they say and sends it to Amazon.

The only thing that mildly makes sense is something like an offline version that controls the lights, heating etc.

steveBK123• 4 years ago

End of ZIRP might not just kill off the perma-loss long startup model, but also some of the long running loss making divisions.

I was also struck yesterday by news that Disney loses a run rate of $6B annually on streaming with nearly 250M customers.

So they are losing ~$24/customer per year, selling a service at $8/month. It's interesting how all the competing streaming services popped up around $8/month that forced Netflix to offer lower priced tiers from their $12/15/20 range, but arguably that was actually the natural, profit-making price.

It's not a customer acquisition cost if you continue to lose it every month.

billychuck21st• 4 years ago

Voice assistant of today has really struggled to prove its value. Most of the things they do can be done with better accuracy by a few clicks on the phone. I think Voice assistant will be useful one day when it's really combined with other more "physical" AI and automation.

cardosof• 4 years ago

The three basic options: either the price for the product pays for itself and its future costs, or the product needs a subscription to run properly, or ads.

Amazon didn't want the first route so they could gain market share/penetration quickly, so we're stuck with options 2 and 3. Voice assistants are a new media and people hate ads, especially where they are not expecting them - so no wonder they failed to insert ads there. We're left with what I believe they'll end up doing - requiring a prime subscription.

balls187• 4 years ago

I hope I don’t find myself with a bunch of smarthome solutions that are no longer supported.

Amazon is nixing CloudCam, which rendered my Kwikset Amazon Key front door lock relatively useless.

jftuga• 4 years ago

That's $19025 per minute!

therealdkz• 4 years ago

good

russellbeattie• 4 years ago

I joined Lab 126 just before we launched the original Echo. After I was "disclosed" on its existence and got one to try, we'd all talk about what we did with it: Laundry timer, alarms, music, weather...

A decade and 25,000 Alexa "apps" later and that's still just about all that anyone does with it.

The Alexa team are (were?) absolute zealots about "Voice UI" and insisted that the entire world was going to be run by voice. You couldn't convince them that voice interfaces weren't the perfect solution to every problem. They were under this delusion that Alexa would become so intelligent it could just figure out what you wanted without you needing to specify - as if HAL level general AI was just around the corner. Every user interface would become voice based. Absolute zealotry.

Combine this with the Rube Goldberg-esque back end where for years literally any "speechlet" implementation had the chance of bringing down the entire service and it's unsurprising this is the result.

I was fired a year or so after I came up with a method for interacting with Fire TVs and Echo Shows which solved the "voice cliff" problem by cutting out the round trip to Alexa and wasn't based on magical thinking. My product plan that I had prototyped and worked on for nearly a year was rejected wholesale.

Obviously, I'm extremely bitter and biased, but I swear to you it was that sort of stubborn cult-like thinking which lead to this headline.

Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

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