I want to admit that I was wrong about this. I thought Alexa was going to dominate as the first truly great voice platform. I now am forced to admit that I was

I want to admit that I was wrong about this. I thought Alexa was going to dominate as the first truly great voice platform. I now am forced to admit that I was incorrect. Those who follow Hacker News a lot might recall that I wrote several posts, a year ago, in which I was very optimistic about Alexa. But I am much more pessimistic now than I was then. When I was still excited about Alexa, I wrote stuff like "How to build conversations via the Amazon Echo" http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/how-to-build-conversations-via-the-amazon-echo http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/how-to-build-conversa... But I was also aware of how difficult it could be to get Alexa to understand certain words. See: "Using a glottal stop to force the Amazon Echo to correctly pronounce “tw”" http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/using-a-glottal-stop-to-force-the-amazon-echo-to-correctly-pronounce-tw http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/using-a-glottal-stop-... But, you may recall, I became frustrated with the process for getting into the Amazon store, and we had a very long thread on HackerNews about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10876409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10876409 I'm sad to say there has been almost no improvement over the last year. The problems that I listed in "Amazon has absolutely no idea how to run an app store" are still mostly true. And I know many, many developers who were excited about Alexa a year ago, but gave up in frustration because we felt like Amazon was not listening to our concerns. In retrospect, I was wrong for 2 reasons: 1.) many people pointed out that voice was a terrible interface for a variety of purposes. At the time, I thought this was merely a matter of offering the right voice prompts, and getting better at understanding what people said. But I now think the criticisms had much more merit than I admitted a year ago. 2.) Amazon's behavior has been disappointing. I'd like to see them aggressively listening to developers and aggressively improving the service based on developer feedback. That is not happening.