14 ms·

Amazon’s big dreams for Alexa fall short

135 points by kjhughes 4y ago

SarutK 4y ago
[dead]
mikece 4y ago
Alternate link: https://archive.ph/2ECVO https://archive.ph/2ECVO
PaulHoule 4y ago
I was looking for cables yesterday and went deep into my bins and found 4 Alexa devices that I haven’t been using, I kinda want to give them to the local “reuse center” but I am not so sure how to clear my AMZN id from them so it is safe.
- h2odragon 4y ago
  > “reuse center” nice thought; but does anyone else have a use for them either? I never understood what the "voice assistant" hype was about, the advertised benefits looked ... non beneficial; the examples I saw in peoples homes didn't appear to work when they tried to use them. Was it worth that much money and effort to have microphones in people's houses?
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    It is nice to have a way to play music when you are doing the dishes. I think I bought one when they first came out, then I got three for free when I bought other things.
    - crazygringo 4y ago
      Yup. Great in kitchens. Sets timers and gives you measurement conversions too when your hands are sticky.
  - barkerja 4y ago
    > I never understood what the "voice assistant" hype was about, the advertised benefits looked ... non beneficial I'm an Apple user, and by extension, Homekit and Siri. In a household full of kids and an all-around crazy schedule, having HomePods scattered amidst my house has proven useful; beyond just being great speakers for music. I use them for everything from adding/completing items on my Reminders list. Controlling the home (lights, timers, etc.). Asking questions (this one is very hit/miss with Siri, but she's getting a lot better). And reading/sending messages. Is it absolutely necessary? No. But when you're lugging around little ones throughout the house, fixing lunches, dinner, etc. -- they can make life a little easier. Sometimes.
- felixgallo 4y ago
  https://www.wikihow.com/Reset-Alexa https://www.wikihow.com/Reset-Alexa
- __derek__ 4y ago
  Alternatively, you can trade them in.[1] [1]: https://www.amazon.com/l/9187220011 https://www.amazon.com/l/9187220011
throwaway2203 4y ago
I love our Alexa, but she's progressively getting worse. She's really only good at setting timers and reminders and even then it's hit and miss if I ask her about my next reminder. Asking her a question is no bueno... I have to pull out my phone and google it 9 times out of 10.
ergonaught 4y ago
Product/Market Fit, huh? We have at least 8 Echos around the house, with clear reasons for a couple more, but Amazon simply isn't interested in the actual problems that the product solves, or the use cases customers care about. They're completely backwards, here. If that means the whole thing collapses and we have to find another solution, great. Products and companies who work this way need more failures.
- noodle 4y ago
  Same. I think the article's title lays it out well. "Amazon's Big Dreams". Amazon wanted to do a specific set of things w/ Alexa and they've found that the market doesn't want any of that. I'll never buy something through my Alexa, for example. What it could/should have been is the end cap for the Amazon brand in homes. A loss leader itself, but a constant reminder of the value of the company and the desire to keep spending money there due to the convenience it provides. What the article makes it sound like they want is something more tangible. Something that quantitatively generates direct ROI. They'll never get that, or rather, that number will never add up to one that justifies Alexa's existence.
- vanilla_nut 4y ago
  An exercise in perverse incentives. It seemed clear to me from the start that Alexa devices were a Trojan Horse to insert Amazon dependence and ads into real-world situations like writing a grocery list or cooking a meal. Similarly, it's clear that Google's search is a Trojan Horse (at this point) to sell more ads. Folks need to be discerning with tech purchases. If it isn't in a company's interest to make your experience better (and it is in the company's interest to make your experience worse, say, with ads) when push comes to shove they will prioritize profits over your customer experience. Instead of investing in rotten platforms like Alexa, I wish more people invested in open source and non-exploitative solutions where the incentives align to improve user experience, not destroy it. Imagine a world where you could self-host or pay a small fee to cloud host your own smart assistant, tweaked to your preferences, not in any way linked into ad sales for Amazon or Google. That's where I'd like to see us go.
- skellera 4y ago
  Amazon hasn’t been “customer obsessed” in years. The leadership there is “promotion obsessed.” Bloated management with too many empire builders. Make big flashy features with no real need or something that optimizes for short term target numbers. Working backwards from the customer is never a thing anymore. This is why terrible decisions like 3rd party sellers (diminishing Amazon’s trust while increasing profits) will continue to happen. AWS and their massive logistics platform will support this terrible management for awhile but it will continue to destroy the brand.
ugjka 4y ago
What ruins the voice assistant experience is that you can't be sloppy, you have to think it through before you utter "Alexa". It is not effortless
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  My elderly parents struggle with voice assistants because they can't get their thoughts out fast enough. You really do have to queue up the whole sentence before starting to talk, then blurt it out pretty fast without pausing, or they don't work. Which sucks because the things could be a really great UI for them, otherwise.
paxys 4y ago
I have basically stopped using Alexa in my house. It started as a vision for an intelligent personal assistant, and what we ended up with is a glorified kitchen timer that reads out Amazon ads all day. “By the way, sign up for Amazon music.” “Tip your Amazon driver.” No thanks. I wish they had actually done something with the tech rather than promptly handing it over to the marketing team once it got some users. I’m trying to think of a single major improvement to the experience since it first launched a decade ago, but am coming up empty.
- tantalor 4y ago
  > Tip your Amazon driver Ha ha, what? Is that a real thing?
  - gptgpp 4y ago
    Yeah you can google it, it's a real program that Alexa will notify you of sometimes (if you're in a participating region), just like the other ads, sorry, "reminders" it serves.
  - Rebelgecko 4y ago
    Mine just asks me to "thank" or compliment my driver. Initially they gave drivers money based on their thankfulness metrics but I think that program ended.
    - bobbean 4y ago
      It only happened twice, for less than 48 hours
- unxdfa 4y ago
  Glad I didn't buy one. If I had bought one and it did that to me I'd actually sabotage our AWS spend on purpose just to punish Bezos.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    TBF it wasn´t like that at the beginning, when growing the ecosystem was their priority. As pointed in the article, the move to monetization happened once the writing was on the wall that it wouldn´t become significantly different than what we have now. Also they´ve always been priced so aggressively, I´m kinda glad I got the original puck at such a low price, to see first hand where the technology was and what to expect from it.
fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
Theres another way to view alexa. It is in 100m+ homes. Its limited right now due to the historical limits of NLP technology. But with the advent of LLMs, amazon has a chance to dramatically upgrade the capabilities of alexa, which is already in so many homes. A product that was too early, but may end up being able to capture the uptrend in AI.
- smt88 4y ago
  > with the advent of LLMs, amazon has a chance to dramatically upgrade the capabilities of alexa This is a terrible idea. NLP, with or without LLMs, isn't remotely close to being able to interpret commands in someone's house. And who would want a non-deterministic voice assistant anyway? Imagine you say, "Alexa, turn up the air conditioning," and Alexa interprets this to mean you want to increase the temperature. There are uncountable and unforeseeable failure modes. Note that this happens even when talking to humans with near-perfect NLP/brains. The major flaw with voice assistants in general is that they only make sense if they have a pretty narrow and pre-defined universe of accepted commands, which is incredibly confusing to someone who mistakes them for actual NLP. It's just a really, really bad UI. I use mine all the time, but only to set timers and turn lights on or off.
  - fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
    You sound like you have no clue what youre talking about. The limitations of alexa and complaints about alexa are really complaints about the limits of NLP, which have just been expanded.
    - smt88 4y ago
      You sound like you have no idea what you're talking about when you say that ChatGPT is a magic fix for Alexa. I gave concrete examples of: - why ChatGPT's style of "convincing bullshit" is a bad fit for a user interface like Alexa - failure modes of NLP in UIs - why NLP still won't save Alexa if it gets to a human level of accuracy because humans aren't accurate enough If you have any actual knowledge or argument other than, "You're ignorant, [technology that doesn't exist] is going to fix Alexa," then let's hear it.
bastardoperator 4y ago
We threw all these listening devices out the door. They're annoying and not very useful. This includes the Google ones too. We would use it to dim the lights or turn on the air conditioning, which is cool, but using your phone to do it is just as fast, and less error prone.
oidar 4y ago
"Alexa, I want to throw you in the garbage." is probably the phrase I say the most to that device. I use it as a kitchen assistant, and that is pretty much the only thing I want to use it for. All the extra crap that amazon keeps pushing on to the device just makes it worse. My main uses cases are: grocery lists, listening to music, setting timers, viewing recipes, making meal related announcements to the house. I really don't want to see any advertisements or other content it thinks I might be interested in. Just stop doing it please. The only reason that I haven't moved to homepods is because apple can't figure out how to do shopping lists that any one in a family can access. "Alexa - Add bread" takes one second. "Hey Siri - add bread" takes upwards of twenty seconds for the homepod to figure out who you are, and if you have permission, and add it to the reminder list. I really would just throw away the alexa's if apple could get that one thing figured out.
- Mistletoe 4y ago
  I hope they never take it away though! They don’t make money from me with it but it is an amazing cheap and no subscription kitchen timer, tell me the weather, play my sleep sounds device. For once, we seem to be benefitting from a company’s bad decisions. She’s also pretty great at answering basic knowledge type questions I may have throughout the day. Certainly an Einstein compared to Siri.
  - voakbasda 4y ago
    As soon as it becomes terminally unprofitable, they will kill her and brick everyone’s devices. It has happened before and it will happen again and again and again to every IoT device that relies on a cloud service. The only way to win this game is to refuse to p(l)ay.
- Loughla 4y ago
  The best use for Alexa is as a voice calculator for woodworking. She lives in my shop, so she can't listen to my regular conversations in the house. When I need to measure things, I can get a calculator out and do the fraction math (which I am not good at). OR, I can say things like, "Alexa, what is 23 and 1/16th minus 2.1625" And she'll spit it out as a decimal and clarify as a fraction if I want. It's amazing.
robg 4y ago
I’m really cool with just music, weather, and a timer. Not everything needs to have a ton of features.
- twelve40 4y ago
  yeah, but they were never cool with you being cool with just that. It was created out of fomo in a grandiose attempt to like unseat the iPhone or something ("the platform"), now that it's just a music clock, they really have no idea how to recoup all that money and what to do next.
mabbo 4y ago
A friend of mine was an SDM for something like Alexa grocery ordering, a few years ago. I remember him saying that the additional revenue generated by what they did couldn't pay for even a single developer on their team. And it wasn't going anywhere. But hey, management want it to exist so they're all getting paid to do it. Meanwhile, my part of the company at the time (Fulfillment) had projects with 7, 8, maybe even 9 figure savings estimated and we just couldn't find the developers for it because all the new hires were sucked into the Alexa org. I'm glad they're cutting their losses, but Amazon ought to have done it five years ago when it was clear this was never going to earn them additional revenue.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
I like getting Alexa devices as Christmas gifts because it gives me the instant joy of throwing it into the trash.
walterbell 4y ago
Alexa has worked well for remote support of blind/elderly/disabled: landline call/answer via Echo Connect voice/timer power control of lights/fans/aircon voice-controlled microwave motion detection to orient blind person FM radio streaming via TuneIn cable TV control /w Logitech Harmony hourly chime + time announcement remote maintenance of phonebook remote-initiated audio or video call remote cough monitoring remote notification of motion/activity
- wombatpm 4y ago
  Alexa was very helpful with my inlaws. We had them scattered throughout the house in case of falls. Neither of them would wear the life alert necklace. What I never found was a good app for medication reminders.
  - walterbell 4y ago
    A timed "routine" could announce text (150 characters) from some/all devices. Slow setup via Alexa app, but possible. Have you tried the WebMD app/skill? https://www.webmd.com/webmd-medreminders-syncing https://www.webmd.com/webmd-medreminders-syncing
  - sparcpile 4y ago
    I use them as for when my housemate and wife, who both have disabilities and are fall risks, need help. All they need to do is call for help. I set myself as the emergency contact, so my cell phone and other Echo devices will tell me that they need help. For medication reminders and dosing, we use Hero Health devices. https://herohealth.com/ https://herohealth.com/
- devindotcom 4y ago
  Yeah, stuff like this was the most interesting use case for me but a company like Amazon doesn't want to market its new, supposedly cool device as a speaking clock for the elderly, or a weather app for blind folks, even though it's super useful for both. I have never wanted one but have been cheered by the division's (apparent) success because I knew lots of people who are left behind by tech a lot found these things very useful.
htag 4y ago
1. Very few things directly monetized Alexa. Doing so was basically impossible. I was in a brain storming session in 2017 on this topic, I walked in very optimistic and walked out very pessimistic. 2. Voice interface is often slower than preexisting solutions. It's faster to pull a phone out of a pocket, unlock it, and load a weather app then it is to ask Alexa what the weather is. Loading the weather app will show you more information. 3. Alexa is kind of clumsy. It will trigger accidentally. It will not understand you. 4. ChatGPT is clearly better at answering questions. It's probably better at running commands. It doesn't directly compete with Alexa, but it highlights how outdated Alexa really is. 5. Alexa was awesome for some things. It was awesome for vision impairment. It was awesome for hands free situations, when you cannot spare the mechanical efforts of using another device or the visual attention.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  > 2. Voice interface is often slower than preexisting solutions. Yes. This is also why assistants with a screen are so much more useful. Google´s hubs aren´t blazing fast either (and get slower over time...), but getting the full visual information at the same time as the voice answer helps a lot.
- oezi 4y ago
  > 4. ChatGPT is clearly better at answering questions. It is stunning that Amazon wasn't the forerunner in using ChatGPT/LLM-based tech for Alexa. A mistake in the tens, if not hundred billion dollars when looking at the price MS paid for OpenAI. Why aren't they hooking up a LLM right now?
  - xypage 4y ago
    Because LLMs are so unreliable. Alexa misinterpreting and giving a nonsensical/unrelated answer is annoying, but fine. If it was an LLM, when it was wrong it would be lying confidently and unless you're double checking everything it outputs (in which case just search it that way in the first place) then that means it'll be misinforming you without you having a clue, as opposed to the current system where it's obvious when it gets it wrong. That's clearly just worse. And that's ignoring the fact that all the publicly accessible LLMs have been "jailbroken" and you can get them to say all manner of wild things, and Amazon is definitely aware that all it takes is one or two viral clips of Alexa saying something unhinged for their sales to start dropping, and the tech isn't currently sufficiently understood for them to avoid that.
screamingninja 4y ago
At first, it seemed like a pretty useful device, but as time has gone on, Alexa has become increasingly problematic. It seems to have trouble understanding even basic commands. How many times have you asked Alexa to do something, only to have it respond with something completely irrelevant? Like it is regressing, which is curious. The fact that Alexa is always listening, even when you're not talking to it, is straight up creepy. Also just plain annoying. Do we really need a robot voice constantly interrupting our conversations and playing cheesy music on command? But perhaps the most frustrating thing about Alexa is its constant attempts to upsell us on Amazon products. Every time you ask it for something, it tries to sell you on a product that you didn't ask for. It's like having a pushy salesperson in your own home.
- l33tman 4y ago
  It blows my mind how anybody who bought this couldn't see that it was a device to sell amazon products.. still, yeah, perhaps it could have had a better balance to both be useful and both sell stuff..
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - screamingninja 4y ago
    It actually came free with another product that I wanted to buy. These companies throw away their spy devices at dirt cheap prices in exchange for an ongoing stream of your personal information.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  I think the regression is the natural evolution of these kind of tools. At first the range of acceptable command is pretty small and once we find some that work well we start to rely on them. But I´d suspect we´re not using the optimal incatations or pronounciations for those, and they work because there is no competing commands for the recognized sounds/words. But as the repertory grows, fuzzy orders will be harder to reliably map to the same commands every time, and the more the voice assistant needs precise and spot on instructions. At least that´s my mental image of why ours results are degrading over time. Interestingly on the Google side, ours got less sensitive over time, with fewer random activations but it also became harder to trigger it.
RajT88 4y ago
I am like most people here. I have a bunch and use them for radio, kitchen timers, music (although less and less because the experience of getting a pitch for Amazon music every time is annoying, if it even plays what I want at all). I also have it hooked up to a bunch of lights, the garage door opener. I have an Alexa in the garage as well for when I am wrenching on things. I do not have one in the office, or the bedroom. If they break, who cares. I may eventually try and create a custom web app to control all these things instead of using voice.
l_theanine 4y ago
I hate the back talking and advertising. I already bought the device, I’m a prime member, why can’t you just tell me the temperature and shut the fuck back up? I hate the stupid thing but my wife has a little more patience for her than me. Siri on the other hand, never seems to miss.
- gptgpp 4y ago
  I have a question about Siri that I don't want to risk testing... If you tell her "OH FUCK SIRI THERES SOMEONE IN THE HOUSE CALL 911 OH SHIIIIT!!!!" Will siri use her chastizing tone not to speak to her that way and ignore you? I feel like it would be hillarious if she did. She's also dumb as a bag of rocks in my experience so I suspect she would. Bitch can't even reliably play podcasts.
  - throwway120385 4y ago
    She's very pleasant if you tell her "thank you you classy bitch." But it has to be the entire proper "thank you." If you say "thanks" she gets offended.
jurassic 4y ago
Things like shopping on Alexa are downstream of Amazon’s quality/counterfeit problems. I can never say something like “Alexa, buy triple A batteries” because I can’t be confident of receiving authentic product at a fair price.
- kube-system 4y ago
  Or worse, you get this: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51ecGcPE54L._SL500_AC_SS350_.jpg https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51ecGcPE54L...
yalogin 4y ago
I never saw any use for voice assistants for most of the population. Yes, there are a few tasks in the kitchen that can be automated like setting a timer but that didn’t need the huge server side infrastructure they built out. Just the NLP to translate text and extract the timer info would have sufficed. However, I have a feeling they will do better in the future with the conversational AI like GPT coming up. They could integrate it in the backend and provide more answers. I still don’t think if it will be monetizable though.
virtualritz 4y ago
I had two Echo Dots 2017/2018. I needed them to do two things: dimm/switch my lights in kitchen and living room and play music. The light thing worked 80% of the time, I'd say. The music thing never worked. I mainly listen to tango/vals/milonga from the 1930's to 1950's. Spotify has all of that stuff but Alexa is unable to find it. E.g. saying: "Play tango from D'Arienzo on Spotify" would yield Alexa playing some latin music, usually from the last 20 years. On Spotify. I mean it got that part right ... I never once managed to get it to play tango. After the light thing didn't improve notably over the course of those two years I sold the Dots end of 2018.
- sgtnoodle 4y ago
  My parents have two Alexa devices in their home; one in the living room and one upstairs in a back bedroom. I once asked Alexa to play Christmas music from in the living room, and rap music started playing upstairs.
tyleo 4y ago
IMO the ultimate feature of Alexa is setting timers… but I feel like you could do this with a $10 device without internet connection… hell, it might have better voice recognition if it only needed to understand a few commands for setting the timers.
DamnInteresting 4y ago
I was one of the earliest Alexa users, I was invited to buy the first Echo before it was generally available. It was handy mostly as a kitchen timer, occasionally for random questions when my hands were too busy/gooey to whip out my phone (e.g., "What is the safe cooking temperature for chicken thighs?"). But then one day the LED ring on the top of the Echo was flashing yellow, and when I asked Alexa why, it responded with an ad. I haven't used it since.
vishnugupta 4y ago
I was a software developer in that division in 2012 so I got to witness the early days of optimism. After tasting success with Kindle Amazon went full throttle with their hardware investment. They were optimistic about replicating Kindle success so they threw the entire kitchen sink at it. The division hired 1000+ in product and development in a matter of weeks. It was truly heady days but equally chaotic as no one had a clue as to what were they supposed to be working on. Managers and execs promptly built their empires took promotions etc. However it was not clear to anyone how would they monetize. Whenever some lowly developer asked the answer was standard, Amazon’s model is to grow big first and then figure out making money. But for the interest rate hikes perhaps they could have continued down the path, who knows. All that said, if I owned any of Alexa devices I’d be planning on sunsetting them. They will put the entire infrastructure on a strictly lights on mode. So expect things to break on the edges, at first.
- deleted 4y ago
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- aardvarkr 4y ago
  Alexa the service is doing just fine. Alexa the hardware group has been significantly cut. Or at least that’s how I understand it.
- tootie 4y ago
  I think the Alexa hardware has more or less reached maturity. And even the software side is probably going into regroup and harden mode. It's no longer going to be your digital butler but a smart speaker that can play music and set alarms and tell you the weather and maybe turn the lights on. Which is altogether a much smaller vision than 2012 but something extremely useful and with a still growing base of users.
- XCSme 4y ago
  > Amazon’s model is to grow big first and then figure out making money I think this is the case with most start-ups nowadays. Attention is considered to be the most valuable thing you can get from a person, the assumption being is that you have the attention, you should easily be able to monetize it somehow. Also, the number of users is what investors mostly care about in the early stages and the "traction" is one of the highest valued KPIs. I do think this is wrong though, from many, many points of view. The worst way in which is wrong is that we end up not creating good products or products that provide value, but only addicting products or those that provide instant-gratification and are purely focused on the short-term benefits.
ianvisits 4y ago
I bought one as it makes it easier to control my lighting -- and that's all I use it for. I also however changed the trigger from Alexa to Computer. Which makes watching episodes of Star Trek... interesting.
ARandomerDude 4y ago
> His voice assistant would help do all manner of tasks, such as...read kids a bedtime story. What a sad goal. The bond produced by parents reading a bedtime story to their children is difficult to put into words. But it is real and enduring.
reuven 4y ago
I love our Echo. It's in the kitchen. We use it for shopping lists, timers, reminders, weather forecasts, translating measurements, and answering questions. We use it as a Bluetooth speaker from our phones, and listen to music on it from Spotify. I get news updates from NPR and Marketplace. My wife got one for our bedroom, and my daughter got one for her apartment. It's a fantastic device, given how little we paid for it, how much we use it, and how it doesn't cost us anything beyond our Prime and Spotify memberships. Also? It's also a terrible business. I'm not surprised that Amazon has been losing billions on it, and is trying to figure out how to make it profitable.
steveylang 4y ago
I think Alexa works as a pretty good, inexpensive home automation system. I never use Alexa as a general assistant or search engine, but I do have some Echos throughout the house that work well for voice controlling my outdoor lights, home stereo, garage door, and thermostat. The Skills system works well for me, and I each time I've added some internet-connected device I look for Alexa compatibility. So in that sense it's a plus for Amazon. When they supported the Dash Wand, it was a great weatherproof remote control for my outdoor audio. But all of this stuff has not motivated me to otherwise shop more or whatever (which was specifically their main goal with the Dash Wand.) I also remember getting some of those Amazon button things for re-ordering stuff, but they were more trouble than they were worth- I accidentally pushed the button a lot more than I ever intentionally did.
m3kw9 4y ago
And ppl were rating smart speaker by their assistants, turns out they are pretty useless most of the time anyway. What matter is sound quality and Apple seem to have been right to focus on that
jader201 4y ago
Apologies for the meta comment*, but I find it odd that an article with only 55 upvotes is still on the first page after 7 hours. Usually only articles with hundreds (plural) of upvotes survive the front page that long. Or maybe it’s just a slow news day, and not many are beating it out? *Not really sure how else to surface something like this, other than maybe AskHN, but not sure it’s worthy of a separate post.
- urbandw311er 4y ago
  And one that generates revenue for the FT too!
  - dx034 4y ago
    I don't think there's a hidden deal between dang and the FT to manipulate rankings. Or isn't that what you were referring to?
    - urbandw311er 4y ago
      No, that's something you've invented.
- nerdile 4y ago
  Why this story? Why now? Nothing new, no new insight from FT. I assume people just really want to share their opinion about voice assistants and Alexa?
inamberclad 4y ago
The thing is that Alexa doesn't really solve anything important. Another device to ask questions? My phone is closer. A system that can turn lights on and off at the sound of my voice? Not without additional work.
benjaminwootton 4y ago
I’ve bought and run around 10 Alexas across 2 properties so they must be doing something right. I don’t use it for much, but for around $250 I can get Spotify through an entire house. Maybe the answer is to charge a profit margin on the device rather than an ad driven model?
chmod600 4y ago
It's definitely good for alarms, music, and controls for a few lights around the house. Occasional factual questions at the dinner table without needing to bring out a phone. Does it need to be more than that? I guess the hopes were higher. But on the list of tech products, it seems to have utility and staying power.
schemescape 4y ago
Have any digital assistants actually been successful? Alexa, Cortana, the "Hey, Google" one (not sure if it had a name) all seem to me like they flopped, but I haven't been following closely.
- hellweaver666 4y ago
  I use Siri dozens of times a day via my headphones (mostly for music control) and Alexa at home to control home automation, play music and occasionally answer my stupid questions.
urbandw311er 4y ago
A lot of the HN top stories seem to be behind paywalls right now. Are shills posting these things to HN to drive revenue to the publisher?
saos 4y ago
I’m seriously surprised by this. It’s wayyy better than Siri.
fortituded0002 4y ago
After the novelty wore off, Alexa was pretty useless in our home. It eventually turned into a voice command to set a timer while cooking and asking it to play Spotify. But after many times when it would kick in and interrupt us in the middle of conversations - when we didn't even come close to saying the wake-up word - it got in the way more than it helped. Really glad to have it turned off and put away now.
crimsoneer 4y ago
In these days of chatgpt and convincing text to voice models, I'm consistently amazed my Google Home still mostly feels like the device I bought nearly a decade ago
theshrike79 4y ago
There are only two reasons why I still have a few Alexa devices in my home: - It can handle multiple named timers, which is really handy when cooking, something that HomePods with Siri can't do - It has a display version that I use as a clock in a few places If Apple would release a HomePod with an iPad mini taped to it, I'd immediately throw away all Alexa devices. I used to have a Google whatchamacallit I got on sale, but it had an insane false positive rate and connecting it to a non-google smart home is really tedious.
Aeolun 4y ago
I find Alexa is perfect only for starting music. All other functions are pointless, but telling it I want to listen to some breakfast music and then getting something appropriate for my mood is worth the $30 I spent on it.
Havoc 4y ago
Kinda hoping voice will make a come-back with whisper.cpp. I definitely have space in my life for simplistic keyword driven pure local voice assistant. Turn off lights etc. Largely possible with existing pre chatgpt era stuff but hoping it'll get easier & cleaner
say_it_as_it_is 4y ago
I think Alexa embodies the management culture of Amazon, the same management culture that destroyed Whole Foods. It's a case study about destroying a good thing with the goal of short term profit gains.
DeathArrow 4y ago
> As hype in the tech world turns feverishly to generative AI as the “next big thing”, the moment has caused many to ask hard questions of the previous “next big thing” — the much-lauded voice assistants from Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft and others. So Amazon Alexa is dying, Facebook VR and Microsoft won this round with ChatGPT, after it lost previous "big things" like search and mobile. What if instead of chasing illusory "next big things" and wasting resources in the process, companies concentrate on doing useful things now?
rkagerer 4y ago
Not surprised, and the explanation is simple: They've been making increasingly user-hostile product decisions. I'd pay good money to neuter her "By the way" and "Did you know" suggestions. Just do what I said and shut up! The advertising is getting worse as well. Feels like you can't play more than 2 or so songs without it trying to sell you other Amazon crap - if anyone can suggest a skill that taps into my local mp3 collection I'm all ears. The anti-user culture comes straight from upper management, with diktats like: "If you have anything you can do that you might be able to directly monetise, you should do it."

135 points by kjhughes 4y ago

SarutK 4y ago

[dead]

mikece 4y ago

Alternate link: https://archive.ph/2ECVO https://archive.ph/2ECVO

PaulHoule 4y ago

I was looking for cables yesterday and went deep into my bins and found 4 Alexa devices that I haven’t been using, I kinda want to give them to the local “reuse center” but I am not so sure how to clear my AMZN id from them so it is safe.

h2odragon 4y ago
> “reuse center” nice thought; but does anyone else have a use for them either? I never understood what the "voice assistant" hype was about, the advertised benefits looked ... non beneficial; the examples I saw in peoples homes didn't appear to work when they tried to use them. Was it worth that much money and effort to have microphones in people's houses?
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  It is nice to have a way to play music when you are doing the dishes. I think I bought one when they first came out, then I got three for free when I bought other things.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    Yup. Great in kitchens. Sets timers and gives you measurement conversions too when your hands are sticky.
- barkerja 4y ago
  > I never understood what the "voice assistant" hype was about, the advertised benefits looked ... non beneficial I'm an Apple user, and by extension, Homekit and Siri. In a household full of kids and an all-around crazy schedule, having HomePods scattered amidst my house has proven useful; beyond just being great speakers for music. I use them for everything from adding/completing items on my Reminders list. Controlling the home (lights, timers, etc.). Asking questions (this one is very hit/miss with Siri, but she's getting a lot better). And reading/sending messages. Is it absolutely necessary? No. But when you're lugging around little ones throughout the house, fixing lunches, dinner, etc. -- they can make life a little easier. Sometimes.
felixgallo 4y ago
https://www.wikihow.com/Reset-Alexa https://www.wikihow.com/Reset-Alexa
__derek__ 4y ago
Alternatively, you can trade them in.[1] [1]: https://www.amazon.com/l/9187220011 https://www.amazon.com/l/9187220011

throwaway2203 4y ago

I love our Alexa, but she's progressively getting worse. She's really only good at setting timers and reminders and even then it's hit and miss if I ask her about my next reminder. Asking her a question is no bueno... I have to pull out my phone and google it 9 times out of 10.

ergonaught 4y ago

Product/Market Fit, huh? We have at least 8 Echos around the house, with clear reasons for a couple more, but Amazon simply isn't interested in the actual problems that the product solves, or the use cases customers care about. They're completely backwards, here. If that means the whole thing collapses and we have to find another solution, great. Products and companies who work this way need more failures.

noodle 4y ago
Same. I think the article's title lays it out well. "Amazon's Big Dreams". Amazon wanted to do a specific set of things w/ Alexa and they've found that the market doesn't want any of that. I'll never buy something through my Alexa, for example. What it could/should have been is the end cap for the Amazon brand in homes. A loss leader itself, but a constant reminder of the value of the company and the desire to keep spending money there due to the convenience it provides. What the article makes it sound like they want is something more tangible. Something that quantitatively generates direct ROI. They'll never get that, or rather, that number will never add up to one that justifies Alexa's existence.
vanilla_nut 4y ago
An exercise in perverse incentives. It seemed clear to me from the start that Alexa devices were a Trojan Horse to insert Amazon dependence and ads into real-world situations like writing a grocery list or cooking a meal. Similarly, it's clear that Google's search is a Trojan Horse (at this point) to sell more ads. Folks need to be discerning with tech purchases. If it isn't in a company's interest to make your experience better (and it is in the company's interest to make your experience worse, say, with ads) when push comes to shove they will prioritize profits over your customer experience. Instead of investing in rotten platforms like Alexa, I wish more people invested in open source and non-exploitative solutions where the incentives align to improve user experience, not destroy it. Imagine a world where you could self-host or pay a small fee to cloud host your own smart assistant, tweaked to your preferences, not in any way linked into ad sales for Amazon or Google. That's where I'd like to see us go.
skellera 4y ago
Amazon hasn’t been “customer obsessed” in years. The leadership there is “promotion obsessed.” Bloated management with too many empire builders. Make big flashy features with no real need or something that optimizes for short term target numbers. Working backwards from the customer is never a thing anymore. This is why terrible decisions like 3rd party sellers (diminishing Amazon’s trust while increasing profits) will continue to happen. AWS and their massive logistics platform will support this terrible management for awhile but it will continue to destroy the brand.

ugjka 4y ago

What ruins the voice assistant experience is that you can't be sloppy, you have to think it through before you utter "Alexa". It is not effortless

yamtaddle 4y ago
My elderly parents struggle with voice assistants because they can't get their thoughts out fast enough. You really do have to queue up the whole sentence before starting to talk, then blurt it out pretty fast without pausing, or they don't work. Which sucks because the things could be a really great UI for them, otherwise.

paxys 4y ago

I have basically stopped using Alexa in my house. It started as a vision for an intelligent personal assistant, and what we ended up with is a glorified kitchen timer that reads out Amazon ads all day. “By the way, sign up for Amazon music.” “Tip your Amazon driver.” No thanks. I wish they had actually done something with the tech rather than promptly handing it over to the marketing team once it got some users. I’m trying to think of a single major improvement to the experience since it first launched a decade ago, but am coming up empty.

tantalor 4y ago
> Tip your Amazon driver Ha ha, what? Is that a real thing?
- gptgpp 4y ago
  Yeah you can google it, it's a real program that Alexa will notify you of sometimes (if you're in a participating region), just like the other ads, sorry, "reminders" it serves.
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  Mine just asks me to "thank" or compliment my driver. Initially they gave drivers money based on their thankfulness metrics but I think that program ended.
  - bobbean 4y ago
    It only happened twice, for less than 48 hours
unxdfa 4y ago
Glad I didn't buy one. If I had bought one and it did that to me I'd actually sabotage our AWS spend on purpose just to punish Bezos.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  TBF it wasn´t like that at the beginning, when growing the ecosystem was their priority. As pointed in the article, the move to monetization happened once the writing was on the wall that it wouldn´t become significantly different than what we have now. Also they´ve always been priced so aggressively, I´m kinda glad I got the original puck at such a low price, to see first hand where the technology was and what to expect from it.

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago

Theres another way to view alexa. It is in 100m+ homes. Its limited right now due to the historical limits of NLP technology. But with the advent of LLMs, amazon has a chance to dramatically upgrade the capabilities of alexa, which is already in so many homes. A product that was too early, but may end up being able to capture the uptrend in AI.

smt88 4y ago
> with the advent of LLMs, amazon has a chance to dramatically upgrade the capabilities of alexa This is a terrible idea. NLP, with or without LLMs, isn't remotely close to being able to interpret commands in someone's house. And who would want a non-deterministic voice assistant anyway? Imagine you say, "Alexa, turn up the air conditioning," and Alexa interprets this to mean you want to increase the temperature. There are uncountable and unforeseeable failure modes. Note that this happens even when talking to humans with near-perfect NLP/brains. The major flaw with voice assistants in general is that they only make sense if they have a pretty narrow and pre-defined universe of accepted commands, which is incredibly confusing to someone who mistakes them for actual NLP. It's just a really, really bad UI. I use mine all the time, but only to set timers and turn lights on or off.
- fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  You sound like you have no clue what youre talking about. The limitations of alexa and complaints about alexa are really complaints about the limits of NLP, which have just been expanded.
  - smt88 4y ago
    You sound like you have no idea what you're talking about when you say that ChatGPT is a magic fix for Alexa. I gave concrete examples of: - why ChatGPT's style of "convincing bullshit" is a bad fit for a user interface like Alexa - failure modes of NLP in UIs - why NLP still won't save Alexa if it gets to a human level of accuracy because humans aren't accurate enough If you have any actual knowledge or argument other than, "You're ignorant, [technology that doesn't exist] is going to fix Alexa," then let's hear it.

bastardoperator 4y ago

We threw all these listening devices out the door. They're annoying and not very useful. This includes the Google ones too. We would use it to dim the lights or turn on the air conditioning, which is cool, but using your phone to do it is just as fast, and less error prone.

oidar 4y ago

"Alexa, I want to throw you in the garbage." is probably the phrase I say the most to that device. I use it as a kitchen assistant, and that is pretty much the only thing I want to use it for. All the extra crap that amazon keeps pushing on to the device just makes it worse. My main uses cases are: grocery lists, listening to music, setting timers, viewing recipes, making meal related announcements to the house. I really don't want to see any advertisements or other content it thinks I might be interested in. Just stop doing it please. The only reason that I haven't moved to homepods is because apple can't figure out how to do shopping lists that any one in a family can access. "Alexa - Add bread" takes one second. "Hey Siri - add bread" takes upwards of twenty seconds for the homepod to figure out who you are, and if you have permission, and add it to the reminder list. I really would just throw away the alexa's if apple could get that one thing figured out.

Mistletoe 4y ago
I hope they never take it away though! They don’t make money from me with it but it is an amazing cheap and no subscription kitchen timer, tell me the weather, play my sleep sounds device. For once, we seem to be benefitting from a company’s bad decisions. She’s also pretty great at answering basic knowledge type questions I may have throughout the day. Certainly an Einstein compared to Siri.
- voakbasda 4y ago
  As soon as it becomes terminally unprofitable, they will kill her and brick everyone’s devices. It has happened before and it will happen again and again and again to every IoT device that relies on a cloud service. The only way to win this game is to refuse to p(l)ay.
Loughla 4y ago
The best use for Alexa is as a voice calculator for woodworking. She lives in my shop, so she can't listen to my regular conversations in the house. When I need to measure things, I can get a calculator out and do the fraction math (which I am not good at). OR, I can say things like, "Alexa, what is 23 and 1/16th minus 2.1625" And she'll spit it out as a decimal and clarify as a fraction if I want. It's amazing.

robg 4y ago

I’m really cool with just music, weather, and a timer. Not everything needs to have a ton of features.

twelve40 4y ago
yeah, but they were never cool with you being cool with just that. It was created out of fomo in a grandiose attempt to like unseat the iPhone or something ("the platform"), now that it's just a music clock, they really have no idea how to recoup all that money and what to do next.

mabbo 4y ago

A friend of mine was an SDM for something like Alexa grocery ordering, a few years ago. I remember him saying that the additional revenue generated by what they did couldn't pay for even a single developer on their team. And it wasn't going anywhere. But hey, management want it to exist so they're all getting paid to do it. Meanwhile, my part of the company at the time (Fulfillment) had projects with 7, 8, maybe even 9 figure savings estimated and we just couldn't find the developers for it because all the new hires were sucked into the Alexa org. I'm glad they're cutting their losses, but Amazon ought to have done it five years ago when it was clear this was never going to earn them additional revenue.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

I like getting Alexa devices as Christmas gifts because it gives me the instant joy of throwing it into the trash.

walterbell 4y ago

Alexa has worked well for remote support of blind/elderly/disabled: landline call/answer via Echo Connect voice/timer power control of lights/fans/aircon voice-controlled microwave motion detection to orient blind person FM radio streaming via TuneIn cable TV control /w Logitech Harmony hourly chime + time announcement remote maintenance of phonebook remote-initiated audio or video call remote cough monitoring remote notification of motion/activity

wombatpm 4y ago
Alexa was very helpful with my inlaws. We had them scattered throughout the house in case of falls. Neither of them would wear the life alert necklace. What I never found was a good app for medication reminders.
- walterbell 4y ago
  A timed "routine" could announce text (150 characters) from some/all devices. Slow setup via Alexa app, but possible. Have you tried the WebMD app/skill? https://www.webmd.com/webmd-medreminders-syncing https://www.webmd.com/webmd-medreminders-syncing
- sparcpile 4y ago
  I use them as for when my housemate and wife, who both have disabilities and are fall risks, need help. All they need to do is call for help. I set myself as the emergency contact, so my cell phone and other Echo devices will tell me that they need help. For medication reminders and dosing, we use Hero Health devices. https://herohealth.com/ https://herohealth.com/
devindotcom 4y ago
Yeah, stuff like this was the most interesting use case for me but a company like Amazon doesn't want to market its new, supposedly cool device as a speaking clock for the elderly, or a weather app for blind folks, even though it's super useful for both. I have never wanted one but have been cheered by the division's (apparent) success because I knew lots of people who are left behind by tech a lot found these things very useful.

htag 4y ago

1. Very few things directly monetized Alexa. Doing so was basically impossible. I was in a brain storming session in 2017 on this topic, I walked in very optimistic and walked out very pessimistic. 2. Voice interface is often slower than preexisting solutions. It's faster to pull a phone out of a pocket, unlock it, and load a weather app then it is to ask Alexa what the weather is. Loading the weather app will show you more information. 3. Alexa is kind of clumsy. It will trigger accidentally. It will not understand you. 4. ChatGPT is clearly better at answering questions. It's probably better at running commands. It doesn't directly compete with Alexa, but it highlights how outdated Alexa really is. 5. Alexa was awesome for some things. It was awesome for vision impairment. It was awesome for hands free situations, when you cannot spare the mechanical efforts of using another device or the visual attention.

makeitdouble 4y ago
> 2. Voice interface is often slower than preexisting solutions. Yes. This is also why assistants with a screen are so much more useful. Google´s hubs aren´t blazing fast either (and get slower over time...), but getting the full visual information at the same time as the voice answer helps a lot.
oezi 4y ago
> 4. ChatGPT is clearly better at answering questions. It is stunning that Amazon wasn't the forerunner in using ChatGPT/LLM-based tech for Alexa. A mistake in the tens, if not hundred billion dollars when looking at the price MS paid for OpenAI. Why aren't they hooking up a LLM right now?
- xypage 4y ago
  Because LLMs are so unreliable. Alexa misinterpreting and giving a nonsensical/unrelated answer is annoying, but fine. If it was an LLM, when it was wrong it would be lying confidently and unless you're double checking everything it outputs (in which case just search it that way in the first place) then that means it'll be misinforming you without you having a clue, as opposed to the current system where it's obvious when it gets it wrong. That's clearly just worse. And that's ignoring the fact that all the publicly accessible LLMs have been "jailbroken" and you can get them to say all manner of wild things, and Amazon is definitely aware that all it takes is one or two viral clips of Alexa saying something unhinged for their sales to start dropping, and the tech isn't currently sufficiently understood for them to avoid that.

screamingninja 4y ago

At first, it seemed like a pretty useful device, but as time has gone on, Alexa has become increasingly problematic. It seems to have trouble understanding even basic commands. How many times have you asked Alexa to do something, only to have it respond with something completely irrelevant? Like it is regressing, which is curious. The fact that Alexa is always listening, even when you're not talking to it, is straight up creepy. Also just plain annoying. Do we really need a robot voice constantly interrupting our conversations and playing cheesy music on command? But perhaps the most frustrating thing about Alexa is its constant attempts to upsell us on Amazon products. Every time you ask it for something, it tries to sell you on a product that you didn't ask for. It's like having a pushy salesperson in your own home.

l33tman 4y ago
It blows my mind how anybody who bought this couldn't see that it was a device to sell amazon products.. still, yeah, perhaps it could have had a better balance to both be useful and both sell stuff..
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- screamingninja 4y ago
  It actually came free with another product that I wanted to buy. These companies throw away their spy devices at dirt cheap prices in exchange for an ongoing stream of your personal information.
makeitdouble 4y ago
I think the regression is the natural evolution of these kind of tools. At first the range of acceptable command is pretty small and once we find some that work well we start to rely on them. But I´d suspect we´re not using the optimal incatations or pronounciations for those, and they work because there is no competing commands for the recognized sounds/words. But as the repertory grows, fuzzy orders will be harder to reliably map to the same commands every time, and the more the voice assistant needs precise and spot on instructions. At least that´s my mental image of why ours results are degrading over time. Interestingly on the Google side, ours got less sensitive over time, with fewer random activations but it also became harder to trigger it.

RajT88 4y ago

I am like most people here. I have a bunch and use them for radio, kitchen timers, music (although less and less because the experience of getting a pitch for Amazon music every time is annoying, if it even plays what I want at all). I also have it hooked up to a bunch of lights, the garage door opener. I have an Alexa in the garage as well for when I am wrenching on things. I do not have one in the office, or the bedroom. If they break, who cares. I may eventually try and create a custom web app to control all these things instead of using voice.

l_theanine 4y ago

I hate the back talking and advertising. I already bought the device, I’m a prime member, why can’t you just tell me the temperature and shut the fuck back up? I hate the stupid thing but my wife has a little more patience for her than me. Siri on the other hand, never seems to miss.

gptgpp 4y ago
I have a question about Siri that I don't want to risk testing... If you tell her "OH FUCK SIRI THERES SOMEONE IN THE HOUSE CALL 911 OH SHIIIIT!!!!" Will siri use her chastizing tone not to speak to her that way and ignore you? I feel like it would be hillarious if she did. She's also dumb as a bag of rocks in my experience so I suspect she would. Bitch can't even reliably play podcasts.
- throwway120385 4y ago
  She's very pleasant if you tell her "thank you you classy bitch." But it has to be the entire proper "thank you." If you say "thanks" she gets offended.

jurassic 4y ago

Things like shopping on Alexa are downstream of Amazon’s quality/counterfeit problems. I can never say something like “Alexa, buy triple A batteries” because I can’t be confident of receiving authentic product at a fair price.

kube-system 4y ago
Or worse, you get this: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51ecGcPE54L._SL500_AC_SS350_.jpg https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51ecGcPE54L...

yalogin 4y ago

I never saw any use for voice assistants for most of the population. Yes, there are a few tasks in the kitchen that can be automated like setting a timer but that didn’t need the huge server side infrastructure they built out. Just the NLP to translate text and extract the timer info would have sufficed. However, I have a feeling they will do better in the future with the conversational AI like GPT coming up. They could integrate it in the backend and provide more answers. I still don’t think if it will be monetizable though.

virtualritz 4y ago

I had two Echo Dots 2017/2018. I needed them to do two things: dimm/switch my lights in kitchen and living room and play music. The light thing worked 80% of the time, I'd say. The music thing never worked. I mainly listen to tango/vals/milonga from the 1930's to 1950's. Spotify has all of that stuff but Alexa is unable to find it. E.g. saying: "Play tango from D'Arienzo on Spotify" would yield Alexa playing some latin music, usually from the last 20 years. On Spotify. I mean it got that part right ... I never once managed to get it to play tango. After the light thing didn't improve notably over the course of those two years I sold the Dots end of 2018.

sgtnoodle 4y ago
My parents have two Alexa devices in their home; one in the living room and one upstairs in a back bedroom. I once asked Alexa to play Christmas music from in the living room, and rap music started playing upstairs.

tyleo 4y ago

IMO the ultimate feature of Alexa is setting timers… but I feel like you could do this with a $10 device without internet connection… hell, it might have better voice recognition if it only needed to understand a few commands for setting the timers.

DamnInteresting 4y ago

I was one of the earliest Alexa users, I was invited to buy the first Echo before it was generally available. It was handy mostly as a kitchen timer, occasionally for random questions when my hands were too busy/gooey to whip out my phone (e.g., "What is the safe cooking temperature for chicken thighs?"). But then one day the LED ring on the top of the Echo was flashing yellow, and when I asked Alexa why, it responded with an ad. I haven't used it since.

vishnugupta 4y ago

I was a software developer in that division in 2012 so I got to witness the early days of optimism. After tasting success with Kindle Amazon went full throttle with their hardware investment. They were optimistic about replicating Kindle success so they threw the entire kitchen sink at it. The division hired 1000+ in product and development in a matter of weeks. It was truly heady days but equally chaotic as no one had a clue as to what were they supposed to be working on. Managers and execs promptly built their empires took promotions etc. However it was not clear to anyone how would they monetize. Whenever some lowly developer asked the answer was standard, Amazon’s model is to grow big first and then figure out making money. But for the interest rate hikes perhaps they could have continued down the path, who knows. All that said, if I owned any of Alexa devices I’d be planning on sunsetting them. They will put the entire infrastructure on a strictly lights on mode. So expect things to break on the edges, at first.

deleted 4y ago
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aardvarkr 4y ago
Alexa the service is doing just fine. Alexa the hardware group has been significantly cut. Or at least that’s how I understand it.
tootie 4y ago
I think the Alexa hardware has more or less reached maturity. And even the software side is probably going into regroup and harden mode. It's no longer going to be your digital butler but a smart speaker that can play music and set alarms and tell you the weather and maybe turn the lights on. Which is altogether a much smaller vision than 2012 but something extremely useful and with a still growing base of users.
XCSme 4y ago
> Amazon’s model is to grow big first and then figure out making money I think this is the case with most start-ups nowadays. Attention is considered to be the most valuable thing you can get from a person, the assumption being is that you have the attention, you should easily be able to monetize it somehow. Also, the number of users is what investors mostly care about in the early stages and the "traction" is one of the highest valued KPIs. I do think this is wrong though, from many, many points of view. The worst way in which is wrong is that we end up not creating good products or products that provide value, but only addicting products or those that provide instant-gratification and are purely focused on the short-term benefits.

ianvisits 4y ago

I bought one as it makes it easier to control my lighting -- and that's all I use it for. I also however changed the trigger from Alexa to Computer. Which makes watching episodes of Star Trek... interesting.

ARandomerDude 4y ago

> His voice assistant would help do all manner of tasks, such as...read kids a bedtime story. What a sad goal. The bond produced by parents reading a bedtime story to their children is difficult to put into words. But it is real and enduring.

reuven 4y ago

I love our Echo. It's in the kitchen. We use it for shopping lists, timers, reminders, weather forecasts, translating measurements, and answering questions. We use it as a Bluetooth speaker from our phones, and listen to music on it from Spotify. I get news updates from NPR and Marketplace. My wife got one for our bedroom, and my daughter got one for her apartment. It's a fantastic device, given how little we paid for it, how much we use it, and how it doesn't cost us anything beyond our Prime and Spotify memberships. Also? It's also a terrible business. I'm not surprised that Amazon has been losing billions on it, and is trying to figure out how to make it profitable.

steveylang 4y ago

I think Alexa works as a pretty good, inexpensive home automation system. I never use Alexa as a general assistant or search engine, but I do have some Echos throughout the house that work well for voice controlling my outdoor lights, home stereo, garage door, and thermostat. The Skills system works well for me, and I each time I've added some internet-connected device I look for Alexa compatibility. So in that sense it's a plus for Amazon. When they supported the Dash Wand, it was a great weatherproof remote control for my outdoor audio. But all of this stuff has not motivated me to otherwise shop more or whatever (which was specifically their main goal with the Dash Wand.) I also remember getting some of those Amazon button things for re-ordering stuff, but they were more trouble than they were worth- I accidentally pushed the button a lot more than I ever intentionally did.

m3kw9 4y ago

And ppl were rating smart speaker by their assistants, turns out they are pretty useless most of the time anyway. What matter is sound quality and Apple seem to have been right to focus on that

jader201 4y ago

Apologies for the meta comment*, but I find it odd that an article with only 55 upvotes is still on the first page after 7 hours. Usually only articles with hundreds (plural) of upvotes survive the front page that long. Or maybe it’s just a slow news day, and not many are beating it out? *Not really sure how else to surface something like this, other than maybe AskHN, but not sure it’s worthy of a separate post.

urbandw311er 4y ago
And one that generates revenue for the FT too!
- dx034 4y ago
  I don't think there's a hidden deal between dang and the FT to manipulate rankings. Or isn't that what you were referring to?
  - urbandw311er 4y ago
    No, that's something you've invented.
nerdile 4y ago
Why this story? Why now? Nothing new, no new insight from FT. I assume people just really want to share their opinion about voice assistants and Alexa?

inamberclad 4y ago

The thing is that Alexa doesn't really solve anything important. Another device to ask questions? My phone is closer. A system that can turn lights on and off at the sound of my voice? Not without additional work.

benjaminwootton 4y ago

I’ve bought and run around 10 Alexas across 2 properties so they must be doing something right. I don’t use it for much, but for around $250 I can get Spotify through an entire house. Maybe the answer is to charge a profit margin on the device rather than an ad driven model?

chmod600 4y ago

It's definitely good for alarms, music, and controls for a few lights around the house. Occasional factual questions at the dinner table without needing to bring out a phone. Does it need to be more than that? I guess the hopes were higher. But on the list of tech products, it seems to have utility and staying power.

schemescape 4y ago

Have any digital assistants actually been successful? Alexa, Cortana, the "Hey, Google" one (not sure if it had a name) all seem to me like they flopped, but I haven't been following closely.

hellweaver666 4y ago
I use Siri dozens of times a day via my headphones (mostly for music control) and Alexa at home to control home automation, play music and occasionally answer my stupid questions.

urbandw311er 4y ago

A lot of the HN top stories seem to be behind paywalls right now. Are shills posting these things to HN to drive revenue to the publisher?

saos 4y ago

I’m seriously surprised by this. It’s wayyy better than Siri.

fortituded0002 4y ago

After the novelty wore off, Alexa was pretty useless in our home. It eventually turned into a voice command to set a timer while cooking and asking it to play Spotify. But after many times when it would kick in and interrupt us in the middle of conversations - when we didn't even come close to saying the wake-up word - it got in the way more than it helped. Really glad to have it turned off and put away now.

crimsoneer 4y ago

In these days of chatgpt and convincing text to voice models, I'm consistently amazed my Google Home still mostly feels like the device I bought nearly a decade ago

theshrike79 4y ago

There are only two reasons why I still have a few Alexa devices in my home: - It can handle multiple named timers, which is really handy when cooking, something that HomePods with Siri can't do - It has a display version that I use as a clock in a few places If Apple would release a HomePod with an iPad mini taped to it, I'd immediately throw away all Alexa devices. I used to have a Google whatchamacallit I got on sale, but it had an insane false positive rate and connecting it to a non-google smart home is really tedious.

Aeolun 4y ago

I find Alexa is perfect only for starting music. All other functions are pointless, but telling it I want to listen to some breakfast music and then getting something appropriate for my mood is worth the $30 I spent on it.

Havoc 4y ago

Kinda hoping voice will make a come-back with whisper.cpp. I definitely have space in my life for simplistic keyword driven pure local voice assistant. Turn off lights etc. Largely possible with existing pre chatgpt era stuff but hoping it'll get easier & cleaner

say_it_as_it_is 4y ago

I think Alexa embodies the management culture of Amazon, the same management culture that destroyed Whole Foods. It's a case study about destroying a good thing with the goal of short term profit gains.

DeathArrow 4y ago

> As hype in the tech world turns feverishly to generative AI as the “next big thing”, the moment has caused many to ask hard questions of the previous “next big thing” — the much-lauded voice assistants from Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft and others. So Amazon Alexa is dying, Facebook VR and Microsoft won this round with ChatGPT, after it lost previous "big things" like search and mobile. What if instead of chasing illusory "next big things" and wasting resources in the process, companies concentrate on doing useful things now?

rkagerer 4y ago

Not surprised, and the explanation is simple: They've been making increasingly user-hostile product decisions. I'd pay good money to neuter her "By the way" and "Did you know" suggestions. Just do what I said and shut up! The advertising is getting worse as well. Feels like you can't play more than 2 or so songs without it trying to sell you other Amazon crap - if anyone can suggest a skill that taps into my local mp3 collection I'm all ears. The anti-user culture comes straight from upper management, with diktats like: "If you have anything you can do that you might be able to directly monetise, you should do it."