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Amazon missed the boat on their voice assistant. They could have absolutely dominated. They were first to market with a general in-home appliance with home auto

Amazon missed the boat on their voice assistant. They could have absolutely dominated. They were first to market with a general in-home appliance with home automation integration. They did a good job with shopping and music (and timers and junk) but even today Alexa is still far from a full personal assistant. Amazon should've launched an email service: forward or CC alexa@amazon.com and have your assistant keep track of it. Flights, meetings, reminders, even just responding to emails. The voice-to-text transcription is excellent but so underutilized. They introduced device to device calling, but as far as I can tell true VoIP never showed up -- why? This would be a killer feature. Podcast and ebook support was always such a mess and clearly an afterthought. Amazon's devices were clearly always sold at cost or at a loss. Maybe there's a universe where this is anti-competitive, but there was nothing substantial ever there. They hired like crazy, but for what? Why doesn't my car have Alexa built-in? Why didn't they obliterate Sonos? I wish I could use Alexa as a personal assistant, but it never really materialized. My best guess is that leadership and product vision really, brutally fumbled here. I don't think they knew what they had, and were unprepared to harness its true potential.

walterbell 4y ago
> They introduced device to device calling, but as far as I can tell true VoIP never showed up -- why? This would be a killer feature. Good point. They even sell a hardware interface for PSTN lines.
ghaff 4y ago
>I wish I could use Alexa as a personal assistant, but it never really materialized. And neither did Siri. Neither did Google Home. I guess neither did Nuance if you want to go further back. It's like autonomous driving. A partial solution isn't exactly useless. But it's a long way from opening up the possibilities of, in this case, a computer that could do the tasks that even a very subpar human secretary could.
- bergenty 4y ago
  Autonomous driving is way, way ahead of personal assistants. Waymo opened up to the general public in San Francisco just this week.
diamondage 4y ago
I don't think so. I've worked a lot in NLP and spoken with one of the founders of Alexa. Imo there is a lack of core science about language which leads to crazy scaling difficulties in voice applications. (eg.Alexa had over 15000 engineers working on it...) until someone pushes that core science forward, the same issues will remain.

walterbell 4y ago

> They introduced device to device calling, but as far as I can tell true VoIP never showed up -- why? This would be a killer feature. Good point. They even sell a hardware interface for PSTN lines.

ghaff 4y ago

>I wish I could use Alexa as a personal assistant, but it never really materialized. And neither did Siri. Neither did Google Home. I guess neither did Nuance if you want to go further back. It's like autonomous driving. A partial solution isn't exactly useless. But it's a long way from opening up the possibilities of, in this case, a computer that could do the tasks that even a very subpar human secretary could.

bergenty 4y ago
Autonomous driving is way, way ahead of personal assistants. Waymo opened up to the general public in San Francisco just this week.

diamondage 4y ago

I don't think so. I've worked a lot in NLP and spoken with one of the founders of Alexa. Imo there is a lack of core science about language which leads to crazy scaling difficulties in voice applications. (eg.Alexa had over 15000 engineers working on it...) until someone pushes that core science forward, the same issues will remain.