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Nice numbers but don't those Alexa enabled device bring in revenue offsetting the cost and limiting the loss? Or doesn't anyone have an Amazon premium account o

• badlucklottery 4y ago
  You'd really want to show that people bought more stuff due to Alexa than they would have otherwise. Tapping out an order on a smart phone is already pretty damn convenient so that's actually a high bar to clear.
• mcphage 4y ago
  We have I think… 5? Echo devices in my house, including an echo dot Amazon just sold me for $1 because it was my “Primeaversary". I haven’t purchased a single thing through them.
  • luckylion 4y ago
    "Hey Alexa, I need a new pan, mine is old and broken" - "I have the Pan Frying Pan Cooking Pan Cooking Children Family Happy Best Pan from Fhrgwdsst for $14.99, would you like me to order it for you?"
    • mcphage 4y ago
      I think my favorite notification was a few months ago—my echo speaker turned yellow because there was a notification. My kids find this incredibly exciting, and told Alexa to play it. And then Alexa announced to us, in breathless terms, that bananas are a good source of potassium. It even said "this is B A N A N A S", as only a robot can.
      • luckylion 4y ago
        Humor probably helps a lot with making people feel better around these devices. Are you using it for anything non-trivial?
        • mcphage 4y ago
          Maybe, but it wasn't funny so much as dumb and pointless. And: no, I just use it as a speaker and for setting timers.
  • andrepd 4y ago
    Very curious why you would wiretap your home with 5 always-on internet-connected speakers running opaque software for a tech giant. I dunno, it's the sort of thing that would be fit for a robocop-like dystopia just a couple decades ago but is seemingly... "normal" now.
    • tiahura 4y ago
      Because they're convenient. In my house, you'll hear - Alexa, when is the Bills game? Alexa, when is daylight savings. Alexa, play Christmas music. Alexa, what is the etymology of wanker? Alexa, is Chipotle still open? Alexa, how old is Patrick Maholmes? Alexa, what time is it in Kenya? Alexa, ad nauseum. If Amazon wants to datamine the dickens out of that to sell me more socks and USB cables, I really don't care.
      • mcphage 4y ago
        Actually Alexa gets most of those same requests in my house, too ;-) Anyway, it's at 12:30.
      • andrepd 4y ago
        Isn't this the most trivial and minor of conveniences? Wouldn't it take roughly the same amount of time to pick up your phone and type that? Don't you feel the least bit uncomfortable that the trade-off for that is that a tech giant gets a 24/7 audio feed into your and your family's home? Boggles the mind.
        • tiahura 4y ago
          The expected value of harm caused by tech giant listening to my house = 0. Trivial and minor > 0.
    • kurtreed 4y ago
      Not everyone's paranoid about that kind of thing and not everyone actually values privacy that much
    • mcphage 4y ago
• ndiddy 4y ago
  From the article you’re commenting on: One internal document described the business model by saying, "We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices." That plan never really materialized, though. It's not like Alexa plays ad breaks after you use it, so the hope was that people would buy things on Amazon via their voice. Not many people want to trust an AI with spending their money or buying an item without seeing a picture or reading reviews. The report says that by year four of the Alexa experiment, "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.
  • maxnevermind 4y ago
    Why would they need to spend billions on validating that model though? Wouldn't it be enough to have just a 1000 or even 100 devices to test it?