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The voice assistant space is dying: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/ https://ars

The voice assistant space is dying: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co... Some of the comments below are part of the explanation why. It doesn't work as well as people were hoping, and it's a solution in search of a problem with limited application and it seems little monetization. The above article sums it up better from the big tech company's perspective.

Brendinooo 4y ago
The "voice assistant space" also includes Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana, so it's not going anywhere. I'd contend that it's absolutely not a solution in search of a problem; it's much more of an unsolved problem, and a big part of the "why" is - voice recognition/assistance tech still maturing - major players are insisting that the tech supports their walled gardens - price points are still a problem The last two creates a conundrum: a lot of times tech prices come down by selling expensive stuff to rich people until the hardware becomes commoditized. But for a good voice assistant, you need a lot of up-front investment at scale. Unfortunately, the companies that are able to do this are also controlling the hardware that can use it, which limits its ability to spread and be useful. This is why I think Mycroft is important to support: 1. If you can make voice assistant software open-source and plug-and-play, then it frees people up to tinker with form factors 2. Part of Mycroft's pitch to businesses is that they can make custom solutions. There are probably a thousand big businesses that might want to get into this space but don't want to rely on Amazon because they want to control the experience and not give up their data. Maybe Target wants to stick virtual assistants around their stores, or maybe a hospital wants to give tools for surgeons. I also think there's an opportunity for voice control in home stereo, where someone decouples the speakers from everything else. It's still annoying to work with Bluetooth in 2022, and Sonos is still pricey, and another walled garden. I'd love to have a simple controller that connects a dumb speaker to Wi-Fi and lets me voice-control it to play music from a library of my choosing. That's not a thing yet, right?
- liotier 4y ago
  > custom solutions Especially interesting as voice recognition is much easier, cheaper and more efficient within the limited space of a specific usage.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >- price points are still a problem Really? An Echo Dot is $25 on Amazon right now. Which, if you use it at all, is pretty reasonable. (To be sure, if I were using it for music to any degree, I'd probably get a model with better speakers.) For music, I have an old phone connected to a stereo receiver. So it has voice control although I mostly pick a playlist or album manually.
  - Brendinooo 4y ago
    >An Echo Dot is $25 Yup, price point is solved for the "just timers and some music" people, but now you're stuck in Amazon's orbit.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      That's a pretty weak orbit though if that's all I'm using it for. (I do use mine for music sometimes but it's actually connected to Apple Music.) I could switch to a different assistant tomorrow if I wanted to. I've literally never ordered anything by voice--and can't really see doing so.
      - Brendinooo 4y ago
        I mean, these things are credibly accused of violating the Federal Wiretap Act, it's not just about the walled garden: https://epic.org/wp-content/uploads/privacy/internet/ftc/EPIC-Letter-FTC-AG-Always-On.pdf https://epic.org/wp-content/uploads/privacy/internet/ftc/EPI... EDIT: other point I forgot - original article says they're bleeding money, so clearly $25 isn't sustainable right now anyways.
- tjohns 4y ago
  > 1. If you can make voice assistant software open-source and plug-and-play, then it frees people up to tinker with form factors For what it's worth, Google Assistant does have an open API to create new devices. It's not open source, but you can certainly experiment with your own custom form factors. There's even a tutorial: https://medium.com/google-cloud/how-to-build-your-own-smart-speaker-google-assistant-google-cloud-actions-on-google-and-eec1169d9435 https://medium.com/google-cloud/how-to-build-your-own-smart-...
melling 4y ago
It works a lot better than nothing. I use Siri and Alexa every day. If Alexa goes away, I’ll use Siri more, or find another. Siri was a little slow to catch up. I think the story that you read simply says that it’s hard to monetize. You are inferring more than what the story says. Voice assistants are here to stay. I eagerly await the day when I can simply say respond to this post then begin writing with my voice.
- genewitch 4y ago
  "Okay, navigating to the nearest post office"
veidr 4y ago
With all due respect, I find that thesis absurd. Maybe you meant it like, "the voice assistant space isn't going to generate huge profits, and thus giant corporations will lose interest". But even that is absurd. They will still have to do it as a loss leader. Maybe not Amazon — because they just ship us our toilet paper and protein bars and shit. They don't have an "ecosystem" (although they gave it a halfhearted try a few times). But the chance that in 2032 people just like... don't have voice assistants? It's literally zero, barring an actual WWIII cataclysm reversion-to-barbarism event. > doesn't work as well as people were hoping Nothing does, until it does... > little monetization Yep, that might be right. But it doesn't necessarily mean the space is "dying". Just that it might not be amenable to oligopolization.
- voakbasda 4y ago
  I will never have a voice assistant unless a completely open and self-hosted solution appears on the market. And with current patent landscape, that seems incredibly unlikely to happen before 2032.
  - veidr 4y ago
    OK, I can't keep reading this website any more tonight, but for fuck's sake you do realize that the submission you are commenting on is a completely open and self-hosted solution that is on the market, right?
rolenthedeep 4y ago
Voice assistants which are trying to force engagement to squeeze money out of you are dying. Most people only use the voice assistants for a few simple tasks, which is perfect for an open source project like mycroft. It is, however, very, very bad for Amazon and Google, because those tasks don't make them money. That's why they're all going so aggressive on "you asked for the time, but by the way here's a 5 minute speech on all the easily monetizable tasks I can do instead" People like the idea of voice assistants, but by and large they don't like all the problems associated with a voice assistant run by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  Yup - I think this is the truth. I'm willing to spend several hundred dollars right this second for a simple voice assistant for things like weather, time, timers, unit conversion, alarms, and home assistant control (mainly lights). I've actually pre-ordered the Mycroft Mark 2, although no chance to evaluate it yet. I'm very interested in devices that can do this locally. I'm not interested in Alexa/Google home anymore AT ALL - I've gone that route, they both work, but they want my dollars all the time, and it's become increasingly clear that if they can't get me making purchases through those devices - they will kill them off, or become ever more scummy in the attempt (Alexa is now including ads in the "did you know" section - "did you know" was already a fucking terrible decision to include, since it's going to marginally increase interaction at the expense of huge user dissatisfaction. But putting ads there has made me leave.) So basically - I think if anything, we're seeing a speed run of 90s/2000s tech company boom/bust. A huge amount of money poured into the space with no real idea of how to sustainably profit, but the space itself doesn't feel like it's going anywhere. It's really, really compelling to allow voice control in all sorts of interactions - but it needs to be very clearly working with me, and not trying to subvert my intent for profit. That might even mean it needs to fall back to something like "if this command, then that action" style usage. No more changing commands, no more bullshit ads, no more subversion of what I'm asking it to do. It needs to obey me, not google or amazon. Otherwise it's a sales rep and not a digital assistant.
  - cupofpython 4y ago
voakbasda 4y ago
A truly open platform stands a chance in the voice assistant space, as it could be adapted into forms that are useful beyond their current limited designs. Such useful forms probably are not as monetizeable as the current incarnations that invasively collect information about you and your family, so I very much doubt the big tech players will ever attempt to build these useful systems directly. Unfortunately, Mycroft is not very open itself. Sure, most of the code is open and available, but I tried to contribute and found my PRs ignored for weeks. When they were finally ready to merge them, their poor response cause me to lose interest in the project. At that time, they did not seem interested in cultivating a strong developer community around their core technology components; they were doing their thing, and they wanted the community to implement “skills”. I got the impression that community could either get on board or stand aside and watch them work. For that reason alone, I feel fairly certain that this project will fail eventually as well, and their hardware will become yet another high-tech relic of a paperweight. As a formerly enthusiastic kickstarter backer, I cannot recommend the Mycroft project as the basis for a product; you don’t own and can’t control the platform on any meaningful way (short of forking it). It might be a better choice than a closed platform, but not enough to make me want to put any money in it.
- gigatree 4y ago
  Why do you need to control it yourself in order for it to be valuable as an open-source project? Maybe the team has a specific vision for the product, and reading through PRs from random people online takes away from their limited resources.
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  ...but you can fork it. Is the build process really too painful for that to be enough?
C2H4O2 4y ago
Maybe one of the reasons behind this is that people use voice assistants, and search engines too in general, to look for information. Today, all that these products do is suggest instead of catering results. I believe this is one of the reasons people, or at least I, do not wish to use assistants. It feels that a computer is controlling my likes, dislikes and wishes while it should actually be me who controls computers.
horsawlarway 4y ago
It's not dying at all - it's an incredibly useful interaction style. Those companies are failing to profit because they don't understand that a digital assistant needs to be working with me, locally, and not subverting my intent. It just needs to be my device, and not a sales rep for google/amazon. I use voice controls all the time at home - it's astoundingly useful in all sorts of situations, and I'm not even disabled (where it's literally life changing in some cases).
giancarlostoro 4y ago
I want a voice assistant that passes my AI turing test if you will. I want it open sourced like Mycroft too though. I don't care for having 17 speakers that start talking when they think I was talking to them. I wasn't.
- bluGill 4y ago
  My needs for a smart speaker are not really passing a turing test. I want them to be automations. They need to get some things that an AI would do right, but there is a large step between an assistant that can do specific things and an AI that can talk about anything.
cloudking 4y ago
We use Google home assistant devices throughout the house, and find them quite useful. Use cases: - controlling smart devices (thermostats, TVs, speakers) - broadcasting messages - reminders / tasks - asking questions However, none of these use cases generate any revenue for Google afaik.
jm4 4y ago
I don't think the entire space is dying. Amazon is having problems because Alexa has little benefit to them outside of direct monetization. They wanted people to use Alexa to buy things and no one wants to shop like that. So they have these devices and all this infrastructure to run people's kitchen timers, lights and play music. People will buy Alexa devices on Prime Day, use them dozens of times a day for years, and never make a dime for Amazon. Apple isn't necessarily in the same boat. Siri isn't particularly good, but it does all those things well. Most importantly, it keeps people on iPhones and in the Apple ecosystem, which does make money. You already have the phone and probably have a device that works with HomeKit so why not try it out. Next, you buy some new lights. Before you know it, you're controlling most of the lights in your house, streaming Apple Music and setting kitchen timers from your Apple Watch. Next time you need a new phone, you're not even going to think about anything else because if you change you won't be able to turn on your lights anymore. Apple has a plan that works and Amazon doesn't.
- cupofpython 4y ago
  Apple and the garden of eden. Dont take a bite unless you're going all in
- smoldesu 4y ago
  This makes no sense to me. Apple's plan works because... their lock-in is better? I can "control most of the lights in my house, stream Apple music and set kitchen timers" with Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana and even Bixby. What is Apple's actual advantage here? How is Apple making money from this when Amazon does not?
  - Tagbert 4y ago
    Apple makes money from the devices it sells. Siri makes those devices more convenient to use. Amazon is selling the devices at or below cost and hoping that Alexa will make the money (which it doesn’t)
    - smoldesu 4y ago
VikingCoder 4y ago
Ours is a voice-driven music player for our kids. They love it. We have a YouTube Premium subscription just because of the Nest Minis we have in every room. Sometimes we ask it "What's the animal of the day?" or "Tell a story" or "What year was Abraham Lincoln born?" but mostly the Nest Hub Maxes we have are just photo slideshows, which we love, and sometimes we ask "What's the weather?" That set of functionality alone makes them well worth the money for us.
aartav 4y ago
Its certainly not a solution looking for a problem. Its a great way to deal with a number of minor daily tasks. Checking the time, setting timers, checking the weather/AQI, playing music, checking news headlines, etc. Theres a lot of things its really not good for and people have tried them all I'm sure. But where it fails the hardest is being able to increase sales volume for Amazon or increase ad revenue for Google - the only path to monetization seems to be to force it in - and THAT is what is dying. And who the heck wants it in a ring or glasses??
Zuiii 4y ago
I always wanted a voice assistant but there's no way I'm having big tech listen in on me and my family 24/7 just to have one. Most non-tech family members I talked with about this share my opinion. THAT is why these assistants are failing. On the other hand, Mycrodt sounds like something people would actually want to use provided that it can operate locally and doesn't send any data outside the home.

Brendinooo 4y ago

The "voice assistant space" also includes Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana, so it's not going anywhere. I'd contend that it's absolutely not a solution in search of a problem; it's much more of an unsolved problem, and a big part of the "why" is - voice recognition/assistance tech still maturing - major players are insisting that the tech supports their walled gardens - price points are still a problem The last two creates a conundrum: a lot of times tech prices come down by selling expensive stuff to rich people until the hardware becomes commoditized. But for a good voice assistant, you need a lot of up-front investment at scale. Unfortunately, the companies that are able to do this are also controlling the hardware that can use it, which limits its ability to spread and be useful. This is why I think Mycroft is important to support: 1. If you can make voice assistant software open-source and plug-and-play, then it frees people up to tinker with form factors 2. Part of Mycroft's pitch to businesses is that they can make custom solutions. There are probably a thousand big businesses that might want to get into this space but don't want to rely on Amazon because they want to control the experience and not give up their data. Maybe Target wants to stick virtual assistants around their stores, or maybe a hospital wants to give tools for surgeons. I also think there's an opportunity for voice control in home stereo, where someone decouples the speakers from everything else. It's still annoying to work with Bluetooth in 2022, and Sonos is still pricey, and another walled garden. I'd love to have a simple controller that connects a dumb speaker to Wi-Fi and lets me voice-control it to play music from a library of my choosing. That's not a thing yet, right?

liotier 4y ago
> custom solutions Especially interesting as voice recognition is much easier, cheaper and more efficient within the limited space of a specific usage.
ghaff 4y ago
>- price points are still a problem Really? An Echo Dot is $25 on Amazon right now. Which, if you use it at all, is pretty reasonable. (To be sure, if I were using it for music to any degree, I'd probably get a model with better speakers.) For music, I have an old phone connected to a stereo receiver. So it has voice control although I mostly pick a playlist or album manually.
- Brendinooo 4y ago
  >An Echo Dot is $25 Yup, price point is solved for the "just timers and some music" people, but now you're stuck in Amazon's orbit.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    That's a pretty weak orbit though if that's all I'm using it for. (I do use mine for music sometimes but it's actually connected to Apple Music.) I could switch to a different assistant tomorrow if I wanted to. I've literally never ordered anything by voice--and can't really see doing so.
    - Brendinooo 4y ago
      I mean, these things are credibly accused of violating the Federal Wiretap Act, it's not just about the walled garden: https://epic.org/wp-content/uploads/privacy/internet/ftc/EPIC-Letter-FTC-AG-Always-On.pdf https://epic.org/wp-content/uploads/privacy/internet/ftc/EPI... EDIT: other point I forgot - original article says they're bleeding money, so clearly $25 isn't sustainable right now anyways.
tjohns 4y ago
> 1. If you can make voice assistant software open-source and plug-and-play, then it frees people up to tinker with form factors For what it's worth, Google Assistant does have an open API to create new devices. It's not open source, but you can certainly experiment with your own custom form factors. There's even a tutorial: https://medium.com/google-cloud/how-to-build-your-own-smart-speaker-google-assistant-google-cloud-actions-on-google-and-eec1169d9435 https://medium.com/google-cloud/how-to-build-your-own-smart-...

melling 4y ago

It works a lot better than nothing. I use Siri and Alexa every day. If Alexa goes away, I’ll use Siri more, or find another. Siri was a little slow to catch up. I think the story that you read simply says that it’s hard to monetize. You are inferring more than what the story says. Voice assistants are here to stay. I eagerly await the day when I can simply say respond to this post then begin writing with my voice.

genewitch 4y ago
"Okay, navigating to the nearest post office"

veidr 4y ago

With all due respect, I find that thesis absurd. Maybe you meant it like, "the voice assistant space isn't going to generate huge profits, and thus giant corporations will lose interest". But even that is absurd. They will still have to do it as a loss leader. Maybe not Amazon — because they just ship us our toilet paper and protein bars and shit. They don't have an "ecosystem" (although they gave it a halfhearted try a few times). But the chance that in 2032 people just like... don't have voice assistants? It's literally zero, barring an actual WWIII cataclysm reversion-to-barbarism event. > doesn't work as well as people were hoping Nothing does, until it does... > little monetization Yep, that might be right. But it doesn't necessarily mean the space is "dying". Just that it might not be amenable to oligopolization.

voakbasda 4y ago
I will never have a voice assistant unless a completely open and self-hosted solution appears on the market. And with current patent landscape, that seems incredibly unlikely to happen before 2032.
- veidr 4y ago
  OK, I can't keep reading this website any more tonight, but for fuck's sake you do realize that the submission you are commenting on is a completely open and self-hosted solution that is on the market, right?

rolenthedeep 4y ago

Voice assistants which are trying to force engagement to squeeze money out of you are dying. Most people only use the voice assistants for a few simple tasks, which is perfect for an open source project like mycroft. It is, however, very, very bad for Amazon and Google, because those tasks don't make them money. That's why they're all going so aggressive on "you asked for the time, but by the way here's a 5 minute speech on all the easily monetizable tasks I can do instead" People like the idea of voice assistants, but by and large they don't like all the problems associated with a voice assistant run by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

horsawlarway 4y ago
Yup - I think this is the truth. I'm willing to spend several hundred dollars right this second for a simple voice assistant for things like weather, time, timers, unit conversion, alarms, and home assistant control (mainly lights). I've actually pre-ordered the Mycroft Mark 2, although no chance to evaluate it yet. I'm very interested in devices that can do this locally. I'm not interested in Alexa/Google home anymore AT ALL - I've gone that route, they both work, but they want my dollars all the time, and it's become increasingly clear that if they can't get me making purchases through those devices - they will kill them off, or become ever more scummy in the attempt (Alexa is now including ads in the "did you know" section - "did you know" was already a fucking terrible decision to include, since it's going to marginally increase interaction at the expense of huge user dissatisfaction. But putting ads there has made me leave.) So basically - I think if anything, we're seeing a speed run of 90s/2000s tech company boom/bust. A huge amount of money poured into the space with no real idea of how to sustainably profit, but the space itself doesn't feel like it's going anywhere. It's really, really compelling to allow voice control in all sorts of interactions - but it needs to be very clearly working with me, and not trying to subvert my intent for profit. That might even mean it needs to fall back to something like "if this command, then that action" style usage. No more changing commands, no more bullshit ads, no more subversion of what I'm asking it to do. It needs to obey me, not google or amazon. Otherwise it's a sales rep and not a digital assistant.
- cupofpython 4y ago

voakbasda 4y ago

A truly open platform stands a chance in the voice assistant space, as it could be adapted into forms that are useful beyond their current limited designs. Such useful forms probably are not as monetizeable as the current incarnations that invasively collect information about you and your family, so I very much doubt the big tech players will ever attempt to build these useful systems directly. Unfortunately, Mycroft is not very open itself. Sure, most of the code is open and available, but I tried to contribute and found my PRs ignored for weeks. When they were finally ready to merge them, their poor response cause me to lose interest in the project. At that time, they did not seem interested in cultivating a strong developer community around their core technology components; they were doing their thing, and they wanted the community to implement “skills”. I got the impression that community could either get on board or stand aside and watch them work. For that reason alone, I feel fairly certain that this project will fail eventually as well, and their hardware will become yet another high-tech relic of a paperweight. As a formerly enthusiastic kickstarter backer, I cannot recommend the Mycroft project as the basis for a product; you don’t own and can’t control the platform on any meaningful way (short of forking it). It might be a better choice than a closed platform, but not enough to make me want to put any money in it.

gigatree 4y ago
Why do you need to control it yourself in order for it to be valuable as an open-source project? Maybe the team has a specific vision for the product, and reading through PRs from random people online takes away from their limited resources.
thomastjeffery 4y ago
...but you can fork it. Is the build process really too painful for that to be enough?

C2H4O2 4y ago

Maybe one of the reasons behind this is that people use voice assistants, and search engines too in general, to look for information. Today, all that these products do is suggest instead of catering results. I believe this is one of the reasons people, or at least I, do not wish to use assistants. It feels that a computer is controlling my likes, dislikes and wishes while it should actually be me who controls computers.

horsawlarway 4y ago

It's not dying at all - it's an incredibly useful interaction style. Those companies are failing to profit because they don't understand that a digital assistant needs to be working with me, locally, and not subverting my intent. It just needs to be my device, and not a sales rep for google/amazon. I use voice controls all the time at home - it's astoundingly useful in all sorts of situations, and I'm not even disabled (where it's literally life changing in some cases).

giancarlostoro 4y ago

I want a voice assistant that passes my AI turing test if you will. I want it open sourced like Mycroft too though. I don't care for having 17 speakers that start talking when they think I was talking to them. I wasn't.

bluGill 4y ago
My needs for a smart speaker are not really passing a turing test. I want them to be automations. They need to get some things that an AI would do right, but there is a large step between an assistant that can do specific things and an AI that can talk about anything.

cloudking 4y ago

We use Google home assistant devices throughout the house, and find them quite useful. Use cases: - controlling smart devices (thermostats, TVs, speakers) - broadcasting messages - reminders / tasks - asking questions However, none of these use cases generate any revenue for Google afaik.

jm4 4y ago

I don't think the entire space is dying. Amazon is having problems because Alexa has little benefit to them outside of direct monetization. They wanted people to use Alexa to buy things and no one wants to shop like that. So they have these devices and all this infrastructure to run people's kitchen timers, lights and play music. People will buy Alexa devices on Prime Day, use them dozens of times a day for years, and never make a dime for Amazon. Apple isn't necessarily in the same boat. Siri isn't particularly good, but it does all those things well. Most importantly, it keeps people on iPhones and in the Apple ecosystem, which does make money. You already have the phone and probably have a device that works with HomeKit so why not try it out. Next, you buy some new lights. Before you know it, you're controlling most of the lights in your house, streaming Apple Music and setting kitchen timers from your Apple Watch. Next time you need a new phone, you're not even going to think about anything else because if you change you won't be able to turn on your lights anymore. Apple has a plan that works and Amazon doesn't.

cupofpython 4y ago
Apple and the garden of eden. Dont take a bite unless you're going all in
smoldesu 4y ago
This makes no sense to me. Apple's plan works because... their lock-in is better? I can "control most of the lights in my house, stream Apple music and set kitchen timers" with Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana and even Bixby. What is Apple's actual advantage here? How is Apple making money from this when Amazon does not?
- Tagbert 4y ago
  Apple makes money from the devices it sells. Siri makes those devices more convenient to use. Amazon is selling the devices at or below cost and hoping that Alexa will make the money (which it doesn’t)
  - smoldesu 4y ago

VikingCoder 4y ago

Ours is a voice-driven music player for our kids. They love it. We have a YouTube Premium subscription just because of the Nest Minis we have in every room. Sometimes we ask it "What's the animal of the day?" or "Tell a story" or "What year was Abraham Lincoln born?" but mostly the Nest Hub Maxes we have are just photo slideshows, which we love, and sometimes we ask "What's the weather?" That set of functionality alone makes them well worth the money for us.

aartav 4y ago

Its certainly not a solution looking for a problem. Its a great way to deal with a number of minor daily tasks. Checking the time, setting timers, checking the weather/AQI, playing music, checking news headlines, etc. Theres a lot of things its really not good for and people have tried them all I'm sure. But where it fails the hardest is being able to increase sales volume for Amazon or increase ad revenue for Google - the only path to monetization seems to be to force it in - and THAT is what is dying. And who the heck wants it in a ring or glasses??

Zuiii 4y ago

I always wanted a voice assistant but there's no way I'm having big tech listen in on me and my family 24/7 just to have one. Most non-tech family members I talked with about this share my opinion. THAT is why these assistants are failing. On the other hand, Mycrodt sounds like something people would actually want to use provided that it can operate locally and doesn't send any data outside the home.