Amazon plans to charge for Alexa in June–unless internal conflict delays revamp

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/alexa-is-in-trouble-paid-for-alexa-gives-inaccurate-answers-in-early-demos/

by goplayoutside • 3 years ago

39 62 3 years ago

echelon3• 3 years ago

Where do I get my refund?

echelon3• 3 years ago

This got downvoted, but the product I bought will no longer be functioning due to no action of my own. It will have zero utility. I can't think of anything else that I own that got obsoleted in that way.

Presumably it won't even be able to play music anymore.

echelon3• 3 years ago

I'd be fine if Amazon unlocks it or gives us the source. Let us at least save the devices from the dump.

jeffmc• 3 years ago

And more enshittifaction

ARandomerDude• 3 years ago

Would you pay to use Alexa?

I won’t even use it for free. We already live in a surveillance state. At this point the wisest course of action is to launder your thoughtcrimes through multiple privacy-enhancing services.

SOLAR_FIELDS• 3 years ago

I am thinking they must know this and that this is actually a 3.5D chess move that they can use to get the political will to finally axe the product or at least significantly gut it. It’s well known how much of a money loser voice assistants have been and Alexa is one of the largest. A bet that didn’t really pay off.

iknowstuff2• 3 years ago

Siri seems fine. Runs on device, does homekit things really well…

sgtnoodle• 3 years ago

My recently purchased truck came with Alexia. I think they wanted $10/month to enable it's full functionality. Today I figured out how to hide the Alexia button from the main UI, and I celebrated.

ramshanker• 3 years ago

Unless it is complimentary with prime, I am not adding one more SUBSCRIPTION to my life.

ViktorRay3• 3 years ago

I use Siri on my phone every day. Mainly to set timers and alarm clocks or to check the weather.

I don’t believe I’ve ever used it regularly for anything else. Maybe once in a while I’ll be driving and I’ll ask Siri for directions to some place.

It’s difficult to see why anybody would bother paying monthly subscription money for Alexa. If you have an iPhone Siri can do all the basic stuff (set timers, look up the weather) that Alexa can.

Do some people use Alexa to adjust their home lights and stuff? Would non-wealthy people actually pay money in the form of a monthly subscription just so Alexa can adjust your home lights?

Seems like Amazon’s strategy here doesn’t make sense to me. But I’m not Jeff Bezos so what do I know….

ekianjo3• 3 years ago

is Jeff still involved in this kind of decisions?

mft_• 3 years ago

Indeed; to my eyes, Amazon has set course more directly towards enshittification since Bezos left day-to-day involvement.

I wonder if ‘customer obsession’ means less to his successor;or maybe the new boss’ success is judged differently (eg profit) than in Bezos’ time?

chihuahua• 3 years ago

We use Alexa every day for lights, weather, and timers for cooking. It understands us correctly 98% of the time. The compelling thing about it is that it works purely by voice. I don't have to push any buttons. We have 4 Echos in different rooms so I don't have to have my phone on me all the time.

beebeepka2• 3 years ago

you used your phone to adjust the lights at home and checking the weather?

Talk about inventing problems.

danaris2• 3 years ago

I have a single smart plug that I use to control a light that's inconvenient to reach, but frequently needed.

Siri has no trouble controlling that.

I often use Siri to play music, either from my library or from the free Apple Music radio selection. It rarely has trouble with that (provided the environment isn't noisy).

I use it regularly to add items to the grocery list when my hands are full or covered in raw chicken or something.

I don't think there's a lot Alexa can do that Siri can't, besides letting you spend money directly on Amazon products (if that's still a thing).

Would I pay a subscription to do these things if that were the only way to access them?

Honestly, I don't know. It's hugely convenient to be able to do it, and it's definitely become habit to do so in various ways. I would absolutely be pissed at Apple if they pulled a move like this.

ViktorRay3• 3 years ago

That’s part of the point I’m making though.

Why pay a subscription to Amazon for Alexa when Siri offers all this for free?

I can understand if someone pays a one time payment to get an Alexa smart speaker for convenience. But a monthly subscription? Doesn’t make sense when Siri is free

jjulius• 3 years ago

"If this fails to get revenue, Alexa is in trouble.”

They oughta just save themselves the time and effort and just call it now.

gzer0• 3 years ago

Sorry to say this, but even if Amazon paid ME $10/mo to use it, I wouldn't. It's that awful.

fbdab1032• 3 years ago

Do the current Alexa devices do their voice recognition on device on in cloud? Curious what are their operational costs for the service, because I naively thought that the device handled the basic operations (timer, weather) with some API calls which should be minimal data.

Switching out to a novel AI model just to stay hip sounds expensive.

lolinder2• 3 years ago

Speech recognition on edge devices is still very compute intensive—it's either too slow or inaccurate or constrained in what it can recognize. Alexa and Google both still stream audio to the cloud for processing, though the wake word detection is typically done locally.

Modern phones are starting to do more processing locally and I could see that making its way to the smart speakers as well if they survive as a product category, but they're definitely paying for compute on most existing devices.

fbdab1032• 3 years ago

Good to know. I realize Whisper is new, but I have been blown away by its performance. I would think a revamped device could do all of the processing locally.

Probably anathema to the space, but if the devices leaned into the ~five tasks people use them for (timers, weather, todo list?) could probably tighten up the AI models to be more accurate and/or resource efficient.

pchristensen• 3 years ago

Alexa is almost entirely cloud-based. The devices are mostly just a speaker, a microphone, and a power supply. That s why they’re so cheap and why Alexa has been added to so many different form factors and device types.

add-sub-mul-div• 3 years ago

Execs think progress towards human level intelligence is on a linear trajectory, inevitably to be finished soon after waiting out some development delays, just like any CRUD app. And it's adorable.

donatj• 3 years ago

I am very doubtful this will happen. If it does it's among the most boneheaded moves of the century.

No one's interested in paying for it. It's a mild convenience at the cost of letting Amazon into your home. It's not something I believe basically anyone is willing to pay for. It's something we use begrudgingly because it's convenient.

The only reason I even have Alexa devices in my house at all is Amazon kept throwing them at be for free when attending Amazon events like Re:Invent - I wanted to go Google Home, but I just got buried in devices.

I control my lights with Alexa and listen to podcasts. I'll just use my phone if they try to charge me.

anonimo37• 3 years ago

I've avoided Alexa for years. I've never had any interest in anything voice controlled. Anyway one day at the Amazon checkout, Amazon wanted to sell me an Echo Pop for I think it was $20. I figured I'll give it a try, I can afford to lose $20 and not be too grumpy about it.

I found the whole experience very underwhelming. Alexa frequently misunderstood me. At one time I tried asking it to play a particular type of music and it said I require a subscription. I tried some of the skills and they were total garbage. And then there are the privacy issues. I live alone so I was not too concerned but I would always make sure it was off before using the phone.

The only thing I would really want to use a product like Alexa for and pay for it with a subscription is if I could use it for language learning. But my bar for this is very high. I'm not interested in something that just feeds me phrases to learn. It would need to combine the capabilities of ChatGPT with the ability to adapt its output to my level, provide useful feedback, and have excellent voice recognition for bad accents and the ability to suggest improvements to my pronunciation and grammar. I don't see this happening any time soon.

colechristensen• 3 years ago

LLMs can write fanfiction and Alexa/Siri fail to understand a single sentence unless it's in the one word order they get.

ninth_ant• 3 years ago

Hey Siri, set an alarm for 5pm and call it “take out trash”

Got it. Your alarm for 5pm “collet take out trash” is set.

lagadu• 3 years ago

I use my Alexa to start my vacuum cleaner (maybe 3-5 times a week), to set timers (about once a week) and to check the temperature outside (less than once a month).

I wouldn't pay $1 for this, it's all stuff that my phone can already do.

klipklop• 3 years ago

Zero percent chance I would pay for these assistants. Due to how useless they are I have been considering removing my Google home devices. In some ways they are worse now than launch. I suspect Alexa devices are similar.

jader201• 3 years ago

Other than sometimes not understanding what I’m calling my devices (mostly lights, and mostly because I don’t have them named consistently), my Google Home devices work just fine.

I keep seeing articles about complaints with Alexa, but we use Google Home quite a bit without any of these problems.

It’s not perfect, but any issues we have with them now are the same issues we’ve always had with them. I don’t know of any regressions.

But maybe we don’t use those features?

We mostly use it to control our smart devices (lights, vacuums), set timers, ask it questions (that we would otherwise Google), and play music on Spotify. The most common uses, I would think.

justinhj• 3 years ago

As a standalone service I think most people would switch to Siri or Google assistant rather than pay Alexa plus unless it was significantly more useful. I think people would pay for an all encompassing home awareness ai integrating smart devices but also Blink cameras. Subscribing to Blink is already compelling, if you add control and identification of people and intentions into Blink along with an ai controlled home that could be worth a subscription

menacingly• 3 years ago

I used to find my Alexa devices useful, until they took the widely-discussed quality nosedive and started understanding less than half of what they used to. I can't think of anything else I've purchased that became so markedly worse of a thing after I bought it. 1 experience of misunderstanding stomps out 10 of it working perfectly.

I'd read a book on the inside story of the failure of this product. From cute, moderately useful novelty to glitchy, nagging revenue grab that takes it upon itself to come into your home with "offers". Eroding goodwill, missing the boat on AI you're naturally leveraged to integrate with your large installed base, it's shiny object middle management bingo.

spaceman_2020• 3 years ago

Why are Siri and Alexa so bad at understanding instructions? I have to be precise and clear if I want anything done.

Meanwhile with VoiceGPT, I can fill my instructions with awkward pauses, unclear language, and it still gets what I’m trying to say.

2muchcoffeeman• 3 years ago

Makes sense to me. We already have a term for mishearing something: eggcorn.

Now multiply by many languages, dialects, accents. Unless they had regional interpreters down to the accent level, why would it understand anything? Humans don’t understand each other with different accents even if the language is the same.

sliken3• 3 years ago

Man alexa is bad. I got the high end one with a display. It was impressively stupid, didn't seem to "know" anything. It would either fail, or just return search results. Would annoying display something interesting on the display and ask you to inquire about it, only to profess it knew nothing when asked. I ended up unplugging it.

Google Assistant on the other hand "knew" things. List movies from a director, verify if an actor was in a movie, pull random facts like the wheelbase of a 2004 subaru WRX. When having a discussion with friends/family I'd rather ask google to verify something then the annoying habit of checking out the conversation to check my phone. Last thing I want is to hang out with people who mostly end up looking at their phones.

GA does seem stupider than it was, seems like they are using a smaller model for cheaper inference. But GA still pretty good at random facts, weather, timers, alarm clock, playing music, broadcasting to the household, and related.

yeknoda• 3 years ago

They are considering charging because Alexa is about to get a massive update with agent capabilities. If you are paying 20/month for gpt4, you are probably willing to pay much more for amazons equivalent but that can actually do things for you like get groceries, get things delivered, one command purchase, etc. maybe even buy plane lowest cost plane tickets or make reservations.

NewJazz• 3 years ago

If it could really do all that stuff then wouldn't amazon just earn a commission on all those purchases and call it a win?

Also funny how all of the capabilities noted boil down to "Alexa can spend your money more easily and quickly".

ascorbic• 3 years ago

If it gets good LLM abilities then I'm sure I'd use it more, but I still won't use it to buy things and I don't think many people will. I genuinely wonder how many people are happy to routinely buy things without the most cursory ability to compare prices and options.

troupo• 3 years ago

Natrator: as it turned out, the update was mediocre at best, and did none of the things advertised

sircastor• 3 years ago

We used our Echo daily for years until one day I factory reset it and couldn't get it to connect to my network. After that it got unplugged and never replaced. I really liked having a home assistant, and wished for an even-better TNG-type voice computer. The shopping list app wasn't very good (bad sync). Now I use Siri on my Apple watch, and most of the time it works fine. My demands aren't complex.

I wish the voice assistant field got more complex and better. It was a neat tech diversion.

whycome• 3 years ago

Seeing what chatgpt can do with voice, it's pretty obvious just how bad googlehome/alexa/siri are. It would be logical for them to get into the 'voice assistant' space in some way.

Crunchified• 3 years ago

But how will Amazon sell all those Echo products without Alexa?

AndrewDucker• 3 years ago

From the article it sounds like it will only be the AI-"improved" version that is charged for. Which is fine, because I really don't want that version.

aSithLord• 3 years ago

"by the way"... is why I will be glad to have an excuse to cancel in June.

doubtfuluser• 3 years ago

I was pretty bought into the Alexa ecosystem, however I started selling devices with a screen, and never connected my wired smart-home to it. It’s pretty stupid that I can’t easily watch YouTube on it. Also it’s becoming really annoying with talking a lot more instead of just doing what I asked for. With moves towards LLM integration I fear we will soon get dialogues like „switch on the light“ - „I’m sorry, Dave - I can’t do that“.

thomukas• 2 years ago

I’d not be surprised if the hardware division of MSFT (Surface) is working on a personal assistant product powered by OpenAI. It’s easy to see how good it could be : I find the hands-free voice interface of the ChatGPT iOS app really good at handling conversations, some slight improvement above that (eg dealing with latency on either side) in a polished MSFT hardware product would beamazing

Amazon plans to charge for Alexa in June–unless internal conflict delays revamp

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