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Alexa is crazy. Close to 10K employees for a product that they don't even know how to monetize. I understand that it's part of the Amazon flywheel but there's a

Alexa is crazy. Close to 10K employees for a product that they don't even know how to monetize. I understand that it's part of the Amazon flywheel but there's a limit of how much you can rely on AWS to fund you. Alexa is full of horrible managers that only care about growing their teams so that they can get a promo.

bushbaba 4y ago
Alexa is funded by retail’s profits.
- rapsey 4y ago
  Retail has no profits. AWS is the profit center.
  - dbliss 4y ago
    and advertising
  - bushbaba 4y ago
    Retail has no profit after all expenses. One of those expenses is Alexa
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      What needs to be distinguished here is retail as in Amazon procuring and selling goods, or retail as in Amazon being a platform and another version of Aliexpress. The former is a low single digit profit margin business, the latter probably has a decent profit margin.
TigeriusKirk 4y ago
Alexa does seem like it has fantastic potential. To throw so many resources at it with so little result seems like an incredibly massive failure of management.
- coredog64 4y ago
  Alexa was Jeff’s pet project. Management failure, indeed.
  - francisofascii 4y ago
    Failure for whom? The shareholders, sure. But Alexa is pretty cool. It is the first voice interaction that I have used that actually works. So good for Jeff.
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  I think Siri and Alexa are simply at the end of their roads. To move Siri and Alexa ahead, we'd need a general AI so powerful, it would change the whole world. I wonder if, within my lifetime, it will be possible to tell a digital assistant to "order all the ingredients I need to bake the cinnamon buns as detailed in the cinnamon bun baking video I watched last month with the Chinese lady that doesn't have an accent"?
  - dougmwne 4y ago
    Based on the capability of state of the art language models, we may get that soon. The technology largely exists, but the compute is still too expensive. Rumor has it that GTP-4 will be able to pass for human-like.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Right, the missing step to make these assistants actually-useful beyond very simple tasks like "play [album name]" or "set a timer for 5 minutes"—which are basically just a voice-driven command line—has almost nothing to do with voice recognition per se and is more-or-less identical to the problem of "invent AGI". It'll be useful when you can have it create, say, a menu and shopping list for your week, interact conversationally to tweak it including understanding that something like "I'm allergic to that ingredient" means never ever try to include it again while other statements of preference may be much softer, learn your preferences so those conversations get shorter every week, and order the ingredients for you, too. It barely matters if that happens over keyboard input or voice, because the hard parts of that problem have nothing to do with how the input is done.
kennend3 4y ago
> Close to 10K employees for a product that they don't even know how to monetize. Or work consistently. "Alexa play music".. Nothing... Do it a few times and it finally does play music? I could have gotten up and done it myself easier/faster at times. the links and offering is solid. I have spotify connected to my amazon account and this is NICE..but as i said, the inconsistency is frustrating.
francisofascii 4y ago
> don't even know how to monetize Amazon music subscriptions are $15.99/month. Doesn't that count? Sure, you can buy that without an Alexa, but that is the whole reason people do.

bushbaba 4y ago

Alexa is funded by retail’s profits.

rapsey 4y ago
Retail has no profits. AWS is the profit center.
- dbliss 4y ago
  and advertising
- bushbaba 4y ago
  Retail has no profit after all expenses. One of those expenses is Alexa
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    What needs to be distinguished here is retail as in Amazon procuring and selling goods, or retail as in Amazon being a platform and another version of Aliexpress. The former is a low single digit profit margin business, the latter probably has a decent profit margin.

TigeriusKirk 4y ago

Alexa does seem like it has fantastic potential. To throw so many resources at it with so little result seems like an incredibly massive failure of management.

coredog64 4y ago
Alexa was Jeff’s pet project. Management failure, indeed.
- francisofascii 4y ago
  Failure for whom? The shareholders, sure. But Alexa is pretty cool. It is the first voice interaction that I have used that actually works. So good for Jeff.
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
I think Siri and Alexa are simply at the end of their roads. To move Siri and Alexa ahead, we'd need a general AI so powerful, it would change the whole world. I wonder if, within my lifetime, it will be possible to tell a digital assistant to "order all the ingredients I need to bake the cinnamon buns as detailed in the cinnamon bun baking video I watched last month with the Chinese lady that doesn't have an accent"?
- dougmwne 4y ago
  Based on the capability of state of the art language models, we may get that soon. The technology largely exists, but the compute is still too expensive. Rumor has it that GTP-4 will be able to pass for human-like.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Right, the missing step to make these assistants actually-useful beyond very simple tasks like "play [album name]" or "set a timer for 5 minutes"—which are basically just a voice-driven command line—has almost nothing to do with voice recognition per se and is more-or-less identical to the problem of "invent AGI". It'll be useful when you can have it create, say, a menu and shopping list for your week, interact conversationally to tweak it including understanding that something like "I'm allergic to that ingredient" means never ever try to include it again while other statements of preference may be much softer, learn your preferences so those conversations get shorter every week, and order the ingredients for you, too. It barely matters if that happens over keyboard input or voice, because the hard parts of that problem have nothing to do with how the input is done.

kennend3 4y ago

> Close to 10K employees for a product that they don't even know how to monetize. Or work consistently. "Alexa play music".. Nothing... Do it a few times and it finally does play music? I could have gotten up and done it myself easier/faster at times. the links and offering is solid. I have spotify connected to my amazon account and this is NICE..but as i said, the inconsistency is frustrating.

francisofascii 4y ago

> don't even know how to monetize Amazon music subscriptions are $15.99/month. Doesn't that count? Sure, you can buy that without an Alexa, but that is the whole reason people do.