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Amazon cuts 'several hundred' jobs in Alexa division
- boh 3y agoI think we will see a persistent divestment from the space in the next five years. Smart speakers/devices have been a tremendous financial failure and virtual assistants in general are pretty much outdated tech since the release of ChatGPT.
- AdamN 3y agoThey work ok as a side feature. It is nice to ask Siri to play music and that wasn't possible a few years ago. But it's a value add for the Apple ecosystem - not a capital P Product.
- nickthegreek 3y agothe AI will just be integrated into the speakers/devices making them more useful. I see this space actually growing.
- throwaway4aday 3y agoI honestly have no idea what's taking them so long. It's tempting at this point to build a custom integration for Home Assistant that just uses function calling to trigger various actions.
- boh 3y agoBecause it costs too much. They're already losing money on every speaker sold (Google/Amazon anyway), plus the infrastructure required to maintain service. Adding an LLM is a huge expense for an already failing form factor.
- pnathan 3y agoAlexa & Google Home work fantastic in these areas: - Playing music - Playing audiobooks - Telling the time - Setting timers for cooking. - Giving the day's weather. Alexa beats Google solidly in kid-friendly material. I subscribe to the Amazon PrimeFancyMusic thing, and that works well for my Echo Studio. I would agree that a GPT driven voice controlled system might be great. What I would actually prefer would be a speaker system that I could drive with a command line tool _or_ voice. Arguably, a tidy enough installation on a RPi Zero connected to a dumb speaker would be sufficient for the CLI... A "smart" speaker that simply did the above 5 tasks reliably and was driven off of music/audiobook subscriptions would be fantastic. It wouldn't shoot for the moon, but it would be a workhorse.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoCan anyone tell me how Alexa has evolved since its inception? To me it seems equally intellectually challenged since day one. I can tell Alexa to "turn off my bedroom light", I can't tell it to "turn off my Livingroom light", but if I tell it to "turn off my bedroom AND my living room light", then it doesn't understand it. Alexa is as bad as the voice dialing systems from cars of 15 years ago. What have all those researchers and developers at Alexa been doing all those years that the bloody thing can't understand basic command chaining?
- polishdude20 3y agoI guess it doesn't know what a "ling" is?
- candiddevmike 3y agoAlexa was supposed to be a revenue stream for Amazon that never really materialized. As a developer of a now deprecated Alexa Skill, they constantly badgered me into monetizing it. All of those folks were trying to figure out how to have Alexa make money, and my interpretation of the layoffs is they never figured out how.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoMaybe Alexa would have made money if the product wasn't so broken at understanding basic logic commands. How can you expect to sell this device knowing how bad and limited it is?
- vineyardmike 3y agoMillions of people use it despite it being “broken”. They just don’t know a good place to charge for the ongoing server costs. Hacker news keeps repeating that the product doesn’t work or is broken or whatever, but it’s a hit. Millions of people use it daily.
- meiraleal 3y ago
- lgessler 3y agoNot surprising, imo—voice assistants got big at a time when there was no way to implement them except by what I would call a massive catalog of hacks. Now that LLMs with really good NLU for major languages exist, Amazon must have made a determination that either voice assistants are no longer worth actively developing, or that LLMs ought to serve as the core of the NLU component of their dialogue systems.
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- nvarsj 3y agoHas anyone noticed Alexa / Hue being super buggy in the last week. Very delayed, complaining about hue devices offline, etc. Is it related?
- nickthegreek 3y agoRecently switched to Home Assistant to control all my Hue locally along with a bunch of other devices. It was a pain in the beginning and I was cursing HA. 2 weeks later, I love it.
- stbenjam 3y agoYou’ll be cursing HA off and on for as long as you use it. The local control angle is the right one (Apple’s HomeKit is also local for its devices and its great, I wish they’d invest more in it). The breaking changes in HA are out of control, every release is a dozen or more - a good chance at least one integration you use will have a breaking change every time you update. If you wait too long to upgrade it’ll just implode.
- SpaceL10n 3y agoAlexa has been one-upped. She's little more than a voice-operated dumb terminal now. ChatGPT is seen as the "Computer" from Star Trek. Not surprised by the job cuts. Sorry to hear about it. I am surprised by Alexa's lack of evolution over the years. Maybe I'm naive as to the complexities of AI and speech-to-intent, but I remember standing in my kitchen asking Alexa if she knew about ChatGPT. She recommended the ChatGPT Skill which worked, but ultimately I was left disappointed once I exited the skill, and returned back to _plain old_ Alexa. I wonder when ChatGPT will be able to turn on my lights and set a reminder to take the bread out of the oven? I should go look into that...
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- vineyardmike 3y ago> I wonder when ChatGPT will be able to turn on my lights and set a reminder to take the bread out of the oven? I should go look into that... This is the part you’re underestimating. The language->intent stuff is not solved but it’s long been “good enough” for basic tasks. The long-tail of integrating with other services is hard and not improved by better AI (unless you have some clever new ideas). Maintaining the actual logic that lets Alexa talk to hundreds of APIs is very human-intense even if it’s not hard.
- retskrad 3y agoSomehow, some way, Apple is the real winner in the voice assistant battle. They realized years ago that the rise of devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home would not have an impact on the iPhone. As a result, they accepted Siri as a dumb but good enough assistant and saved saved billions and billions of dollars in R&D.
- kredd 3y agoIf they figure out LLM running offline on your iPhone, it will be very funny how Siri will be the winner at the end.
- fintechie 3y agoAnother potential winner may emerge soon: "OpenAI and Jony Ive in talks to raise $1bn from SoftBank for AI device venture" https://www.ft.com/content/4c64ffc1-f57b-4e22-a4a5-f9f90a7419b7 https://www.ft.com/content/4c64ffc1-f57b-4e22-a4a5-f9f90a741...
- te_chris 3y agoInverse SoftBank is normally the best position.
- passwordoops 3y agoOpenAI needs to keep the hype train going, SoftBank still has too much money, and Jony Ive was probably offered more money than he's ever made with Apple, likely making him the real winner
- josefresco 3y ago> saved saved billions and billions of dollars in R&D Did they though? Do we know how much Google and Amazon spend on these devices? Apple may have won the first battle by "not fighting" but the next battle is a race to make these dumb assistants smart. Amazon seems to be the possible long term winner, as they don't make phones and still got millions to buy their "dumb speaker" when they (consumers) already had one in their pocket!
- akjshdfkjhs 3y agoStep 1: destroy search with Ads, brands, and unwanted results. Step 2: expose a little less broken search via voice assistants. Step 3: realize you recreated Yahoo-era "web surfers" feeding a search engine index. Step 4: fire everyone and automate with LLM Step 5: Keep making search broken.
- eigenvalue 3y agoAlexa is unimaginably bad considering the money and time they’ve spent on it. Someone should do a business school case study on how it could be so bad. It literally can’t handle the most basic of tasks involving playing music on Spotify without making idiotic mistakes, or even properly processing the same 3 commands we give it every day to turn on or off the lights. I’ve been muttering for the past 2 years to myself about how they should fire everyone involved in the project. I guess they finally realized it too.
- kranke155 3y agoHow much of our technology was directly inspired by ideas by the Star Trek TV shows? Indeed ChatGPT is now achieving something close to what "Computer" used to do in the Enterprise bridge 30 years ago.
- olddustytrail 3y agoRemember Star Trek was set about 200 years in the future from now.
- kranke155 3y agoSciFi is always an extrapolation of what you know in your own time.
- therippa 3y agoYou can safely say this for any user-facing product Amazon has. Look at the Prime TV interface, the Amazon Music app (and their "free" tier), etc. Everything they put out is third-rate, the only thing they know how to do well is AWS, which keeps the lights on.
- danielbln 3y agoThe Alexa app is horrid as well, the audible app is VERY third rate, the Kindle app is... alright. What is pretty great is the kindle, my current gen kindle (the one with the large screen and the warm light) I cherish.
- standardUser 3y agoApparently, Amazon truly believed people would get in the habit of saying "hey Alexa, buy this thing" and that this would drive revenue. I'd assume Amazon of all companies would know that most people prefer to compare products, read (fraudulent) reviews and look for deals before spending their money.
- aetherson 3y agoI think they imagined it would be used for well-known products that the user was already very comfortable with, where they already have done all their comparisons and are know the cost/benefit tradeoffs with. I could imagine doing that myself, but the voice interface seemed so clumsy and a little scary that I never got over the hump of trying it. There are things that we would routinely buy on Amazon without any real comparison after the, for example, 10th time we've bought them -- but we still never buy them on Alexa.
- lolinder 3y agoThis is what it was intended for. They were pushing it at around the same time as they were pushing Amazon Dash, the buttons for ordering specific consumable products [0]. I agree fully, though: Alexa never became reliable enough for me (or many others) to trust it with a credit card. A voice assistant that constantly mishears things in the small domain in which I do trust it can't be trusted to pick the right thing out of Amazon's entire catalog. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Dash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Dash
- vineyardmike 3y agoAmazon also thought it would be a conduit for subscriptions, and a conduit for in-app purchases. I had seen market research a few years ago that basically said people don’t like buying this via voice without seeing an explicit bill/numbers on screen. That was around the time they announced the devices with a screen.
- daveguy 3y agoThey've barely managed to keep me from pulling the plug with the unwanted assanine desperate monetitation suggestions. I was pleased to discover it finally figured out just last week how to give me my preferred news source when I accidentally say "Alexa news" instead of "Alexa news from..."
- xwdv 3y agoPeople named Alexa will be thrilled that this shit never caught on, and will be on its way out soon.
- commandlinefan 3y agoOr Alyssa, Alicia, sometimes Amitava...
- tsunamifury 3y agoI've been out of Google for a year now so I can share this story: I created the AI suggestion chip at Google, which combined with an internal project called Jane, became the Google Assistant. At the time Sundar was desperate for a narrative to counter Alexa in front of investors and wanted a HUGE I/O announcement, so off we sprinted. But I went to the executives at the time in charge and said look, this really isn't going to be an assistant if it doesn't have the APIs into services that users need to accomplish actual tasks. Sharing some information and changing the music isn't what a butler does, a butler anticipates your needs and executes on them -- and we can't do that until we have the APIs to anticipate and execute. I was, of course, ignored, because in my naiveness at the time and I didn't realize it didn't matter what the assistant DID, it mattered what the narrative to investors was about its potential. So 2017 I/O Sundar announces the assistant and it looks great inside Allo, and it's a great demo -- mission accomplished. Now 6 years+ later, it's a stagnant, overspent team across the space -- because why? Because it can't do anything for users. All these years and billions later it still can't do anything important -- it has no user journey. And it took me equally as long to realize, that still doesn't matter. FAANG has gotten so large that the stock bump that comes from narrative outpaces actual revenue from working products. It makes for a crazy world... because ironically Google ALSO invented the truly disruptive transformer technology behind the LLM and when we tried to launch that with MINA, Sundar blocked it! Too disruptive, no narrative, too scary... I don't know the lesson to be learned here, but wow, it just makes me want to give up...
- entangledqubit 3y agoI'd imagine that if an assistant was really implemented well, it would bypass all those search ads...
- MattGaiser 3y agoIs that a problem? Having an in with the butler is of plenty of value and could easily be sold.
- tsunamifury 3y ago
- very_good_man 3y agoA little more leetcode could have prevented this outcome for this division of Amazon.
- erostrate 3y agoThe main problem with Alexa / Google Assistant / Siri is that the tech was not ready when they launched. We didn't have models that could understand non-trivial user requests, generate non-trivial actions or keep track of context properly. Now we do. Amazon, Apple and Google are all working on incorporating LLMs but why is it taking so long? Why are these assistants still so bad? ChatGPT has been available for a year, GPT3 API for 3 years. I suspect some of it is legacy tech and legacy researchers from the pre-LLM era.
- shmatt 3y agoHow often would ChatGPT hit the exact API you expect with the exact request you need in 1 shot. People I know will still very often try 5 prompts before they get what they wanted from LLMs, that doesn't work in a Siri world (or its just as frustrating)
- clnq 3y agoThis is what plugins do and they work well. See documentation - https://platform.openai.com/docs/pluagins/introduction https://platform.openai.com/docs/pluagins/introduction.
- mamp 3y agoWith ChatGPT some of the limitations of the tech are handled by the user e.g. starting a new chat when you want to discuss a new topic. An assistant has to detect changes in user context somehow. Also, I think it would be harder to know what to inject in the prompt since conversations are more like context based RAG rather than topic (embedding) based. Then you have all the usual generative issues: hallucinations, alignment, sticking within guardrails, no repeatable testing, drift. The potential for errors at that scale is pretty staggering.
- Sakos 3y agoNo, the main problem is that these projects were grossly mismanaged and didn't really have a concrete purpose. It would've been possible to build something incredibly useful without LLMs, I just don't know why they didn't. Though the top comment I feel answers that question quite clearly. These assistants were never developed to be useful.
- codr7 3y agoFigures, the only meaningful use case I've seen is letting them talk to each other for laughs and that gets old pretty fast.
- randomsofr 3y agoAlways bad to be jobless, but during this season is specially hard to get interviews, and offers usually don't come until next year.
- ge96 3y agoyeah... wish I thought of that before making myself a target at work (to be fired).
- filereaper 3y agoWelp I never managed to get my Gen 2 Echo Dot to pair with my Wifi. Did all kinds of debugging but after an hour I just packed it back in its box and put it away. Google stuff "just worked", never had to wrestle with it to such an extent.
- globalise83 3y agoNot surprised - I have voice assistants in every device I have owned in the past 10 years and have never found a good reason to use them. ChatGPT on the other hand I use several times a day.
- synergy20 3y agoall my Alexa echo etc were collecting dusts for the last few years,I got all I needed from my phone,there is no need for Amazon devices at all for me