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

• jftuga 4y ago
  That's $19025 per minute!
• paulpauper 4y ago
  so it's not just the metaverse that is bleeding money
  • bushbaba 4y 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.
    • MBCook 4y 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 4y ago
    without AWS Amazon would be losing money not making a profit. its been around the financial / wsb reddit and twitter lately.
    • mr_toad 4y 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 4y ago
  Not surprised by this in the least.
  • MBCook 4y 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 4y ago
  Would be interesting to know the point at which return in utility petered out from zero to $100 Million to $10 Billion.
• gumby 4y 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.
  • kennu 4y 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).
    • SoftTalker 4y ago
      Have you actually verified that it isn't? Which assumption is the safer one?
      • kennu 4y ago
        Safe assumptions are great for managing personal privacy, but in my view, one should be careful not to present them as facts in discussions. E.g. I use privacy shields on cameras to mitigate risk of eavesdropping, but I don't claim it's actually happening. People have also reverse engineered Echo devices and analyzed their network traffic, and when someone claims the devices are "listening to everything", I'm interested in whether the claim is really based on such analysis.
    • cryptoz 4y 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?
      • 4y ago
• sdfhbdf 4y ago
  duplicate of: Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10B this year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33700160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33700160
• Overtonwindow 4y 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 4y ago
    You can play Jeopardy on it.
  • oneoff786 4y ago
    Music player
    • dboreham 4y ago
      Also plays Downton Abbey.
      • Overtonwindow 4y ago
        For real?! I don’t find it trustworthy enough to let it make decisions with how I spend my money, but for the little things, it’s great.
  • elwebmaster 4y ago
    Its jokes are dumb and boring. Amazon can’t afford to put funny jokes on it.
  • ncallaway 4y ago
    > What more would I use it for? Well... Amazon would want you to do something with it that makes them money.
• mradek 4y ago
  Still boggles my mind that people willingly put these kinds of devices in their homes.
  • danielodievich 4y 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_it 4y 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 https://imgur.com/a/27WcRjR
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    • visarga 4y 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 4y ago
    Device/appliance requires WiFi? Strike 1.
  • ranman 4y ago
    Then your mind is incredibly easily boggled and your threat model is broken.
  • danjc 4y ago
    Ahem, your phone?
• lkrubner 4y 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-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-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/ 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-to-force-the-amazon-echo-to-correctly-pronounce-tw 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_b_product_details 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?
• LASR 4y 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.
  • ncallaway 4y 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.
    • TulliusCicero 4y 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.
      • ncallaway 4y ago
• monero-xmr 4y 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.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • zachlatta 4y 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.
    • visarga 4y 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/ https://openai.com/blog/whisper/
      • walterbell 4y ago
        Is there a recommended dev platform to test this model? e.g. Google/Coral TPU, Nvidia Jetson Nano, Rockchip RK3568 NPU, iPhone/Android NPU, ..?
        • nshm 4y ago
          Coral and Jetson are not very powerful actually, you can't run even medium model in realtime. https://github.com/openai/whisper/discussions/417 https://github.com/openai/whisper/discussions/417 And there is latency issue too, you won't get response very fast. If you look for <0.5s latency or the answer, you need to try something like Vosk probably.
    • diceduckmonk 4y ago
      I’ve been assuming physical factors like dust was degrading the microphone quality
• teeray 4y ago
  Clearly, the answer is to have Alexa read a random unprompted ad every 5 minutes.
  • thepasswordis 4y 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 4y ago
      Agreed, though fortunately it silences quickly upon “Alexa, shut up”
  • jahewson 4y ago
    Maybe it could softly whisper it, like a gentle breeze: “buy more shoooes, buy more shoooes”.
• perryizgr8 4y 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.
• bigtunacan 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
    • MBCook 4y 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.
  • bobsmooth 4y 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.
• thepasswordis 4y 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 4y ago
    > I really wish there was an easy way to just put python scripts onto the device or something. Doesn't https://mycroft.ai https://mycroft.ai fit this purpose? Looks like you can ssh in: https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/mark-ii/advanced/ssh-access https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/mark-ii/advanced/ssh-access and has python running on it: https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/skill-development/introduction/python-resources https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/skill-development/introdu... Has anyone got one though?
    • chimprich 4y 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.
  • SkyPuncher 4y 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.
• mabbo 4y 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.
  • laidoffamazon 4y 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.
  • givemeethekeys 4y 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 4y 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-shareholders https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2018-letter-to...
  • rabuse 4y ago
    Sounds like Google too.
• adventured 4y 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 4y 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 ).
    • MBCook 4y 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.
      • h4n1 4y ago
        Isn't Valve known for letting employees work on whatever they want? I'd imagine they already had a bone to pick with MS and wanted to be able to play games on Linux. Before that, things like the controller also seemed like "scratch your own itch" projects. They're good at making pieces that naturally fall into place.
• xrd 4y 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.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    I really want them to allow different names, I’d rename Siri to “Goddammmit” so fast.
• VirusNewbie 4y 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 4y 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_it 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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?
      • antifa 4y ago
        I suspect they do this on purpose to frustrate you into spending more.
        • fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
          Maybe, but it’s a legitimately hard problem. Sort by lowest price legitimately means show the lowest price item first, even if it’s less relevant. Based on other search systems I have worked with, they probably have an initial fast filter that limits the items from the entire inventory to a loosely matching set (erring on the side of including irrelevant items). Then a more intelligent and expensive ranking system would be used to find the best items from that set (where “best” means a bunch of things including relevance and profitability). Selecting “price: low to high” probably bypasses the intelligent system, so you end up with crap at the top of the list. The low-priced items could be doing some kind of SEO scam to get on the list, or it could be something innocent like a fuzzy match to text in the description (could be a dumb issue like tf-idf that randomly exceeds a threshold due to noise). You could argue that if they don’t prioritize the investment to fix these issues, it’s in some sense intentional. Nobody sorts by low price, because it gives poor results, because they don’t bother fixing it, because it’s not a priority, because nobody sorts by low price…
• andrewstuart 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
    That would interfere with my motion sensors.
• somenameforme 4y 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 4y 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.
    • rabuse 4y ago
      Also, people are expensive, and it takes them to design and program this stuff.
    • OriginalPenguin 4y 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.
    • laidoffamazon 4y 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 4y 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.
• vermontdevil 4y ago
  Alexa, print my CV
• ReptileMan 4y 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 4y 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"
• MichaelCollins 4y 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.
  • SoftTalker 4y 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.
    • MichaelCollins 4y 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 4y 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.
    • lotsofpulp 4y 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-and-Troubleshooting 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.
    • hakfoo 4y ago
• dqpb 4y 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 4y ago
    or just wait till AGI
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• arbuge 4y 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.
  • MBCook 4y 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 4y 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.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/technology/amazon-layoffs...
• bonniemuffin 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
• benjaminwootton 4y 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.
  • 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y 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 4y 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.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    I got Siri to say naughty things by careful instructive naming of my lamps and groups of lights.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
    alexa understands "where's my shit" to mean "where are my Amazon packages" to my glee.
• abledon 4y ago
  vengeance for all the poor souls named 'Alexa' having their lives go to hell
• etchalon 4y ago
  Alexa feels like a "First CityWide Change Bank" sketch, writ large.
• lsh123 4y 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 4y ago
    The "light on in current room" works for me. Maybe you have "overloaded" the "light" name.
    • ahaferburg 4y ago
      Also add "at the present time, in this version of the multiverse", just to be sure it has enough context.
    • MichaelCollins 4y ago
      Imagine if you had a human butler who was this particular with the way you asked things. Fired on the spot.
    • lsh123 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
    Have you tried this game? https://playheyrobot.com/rules https://playheyrobot.com/rules
  • ceedan 4y ago
    All we do is ask it what the weather is going to be today, tonight, tomorrow
  • Nursie 4y 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.
    • russfink 4y 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.
  • 4y ago
• ALittleLight 4y 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?
  • MBCook 4y 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.
• andrewstuart 4y ago
  At least Bezos didn’t rename the company to “Alexa”.
• krony 4y 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 https://github.com/jeffsheets/alexa-papio-lunch-menu But yeah it’s still mostly a hardware solution looking for a problem
• Semaphor 4y 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/ https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
• sidcool 4y 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.
• cbayram 4y 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.
• scrame 4y ago
  huh. turns out people don't like all seeing eyes.
• LinkLink 4y 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.
• dboreham 4y ago
  Is it possible the person in charge of Alexa is less good at disinformation and corporate politics than their peers?
• dcow 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
    • thorncorona 4y ago
      Hanlon's Razor -- maybe Alexa matches to the most probable match and not many people are expecting what OP expects Alexa to play?
      • musingsole 4y ago
        Which is the core problem with Alexa: why is a personal assistant getting worse at helping me specifically (even if it's better for the majority of users)? Alexa arriving with a default profile for generic recognition makes sense -- but after that, it should have learned me, my voice, my commands. Instead, it was one more not so subtle demand from Silicon Valley to become synonymous with their Product Persona -- or be ignored.
• ddmma 4y ago
  Alexa should be included in Prime, 8$
• gordon_freeman 4y 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 4y 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.
• threadweaver34 4y ago
• binarysolo 4y 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 4y ago
    Your Alexa has started talking to you and asking you for things, unprompted?
• vishnugupta 4y 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.
  • creshal 4y 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.
  • rg111 4y 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 4y 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.
• insane_dreamer 4y 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.)
• system2 4y ago
  $10B is a chump change for a trillion dollar company.
  • lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Market cap is not relevant to cash flow concerns. Not to mention that Amazon no longer has a $1T+ market cap.
    • oblio 4y 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.
      • lotsofpulp 4y ago
        Revenue is not the whole picture either, or growth rate. If it is all loss making or tiny low single digit profit margin, then a $10B loss is still a $10B loss.
        • oblio 4y ago
          Amazon is making money, it's only lost a small amount over its entire lifetime. Several of its divisions are making a ton of money and even retail could be making more, but it's constantly reinvesting to grow + it's a loss leader.
• yalogin 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
    • lotsofpulp 4y 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.
• 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
  • maximedb 4y ago
    What kind of games do your kids play on Alexa?
  • rhuru 4y ago
    Our biggest use was orgasm sounds until it got shut down. :(
• rajnathani 4y ago
  Duplicate thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33697469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33697469
• UltraViolence 4y 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 4y ago
    I think you're assuming you are part of the majority - you're not. "Something that makes my life easier! Cool!"
    • UltraViolence 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
• therealdkz 4y ago
  good
• russellbeattie 4y 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.