15 ms·

Amazon will cut 'several hundred' Alexa jobs as it ends unspecified initiatives

81 points by dmschulman 3y ago

ejb999 3y ago
I own a few Alexa devices, and I like them more or less, but doesn't seem like they(amazon) have invested much in making them truly useful devices anymore - the first few times you could talk to them were cool - but after that novelty wore off, the products seem to have stagnated quite a bit - seems the market agrees.
- ghaff 3y ago
  It's not really specific to Amazon. Voice assistants are a novelty and mildly useful thing but I mostly use them for a few very specific and non-critical things. In something like my car where they could be very useful, they mostly can't handle the more complicated queries that would actually be valuable to do completely hands-free. If I had to give up voice assistants tomorrow, I'd pretty much shrug and move on. Honestly, Kindles aren't that different. I like them (and my iPad) for traveling but I'm not sure ebooks have been the revolution that some thought they would be.
- kemiller2002 3y ago
  Our big thing we used them for at my place is vision assistance items. My gf is vision impaired, and it's much easier for it to read things to her, turn on lights etc. It sounds stupid and small, but it really helps her.
- gumby 3y ago
  Alexa (and the google equivalent) were an over-exuberant experiment. Speech is an interaction mode, not an all-encompassing one, and also a low-bandwidth one, so a device centered on it can't ever be a general computing device. Amazon tried to think a bit more broadly by having other on-keybaord interaction modes (buttons, which were really just clutter because their use was infrequent, and their wand, which was actually pretty handy) but again, didn't integrate it deeply into the rest of their world, so died due to lack of imagination. Google's thing is even more stark because it had no primary raison d'etre so I only ever saw one in the wild and it was at a google employee's home! Apple went the other way, making a speaker that you could also talk to. Of course Siri is such crap that it's fundamentally "un-sirious" too. But speech is not a terrible adjunct. I often use speech to control my watch (start a workout, set a timer, what's the weather outside) bc the screen is so tiny and the controls so few. It sometimes tells me things if I am wearing airpods. But I have the watch cranked down to only provide me with a few things, mostly by glancing at it after it taps me. And who would design a tap-only interface?
brycewray 3y ago
Dupe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38305097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38305097
rickspencer3 3y ago
I went all in on Google home, with the little pucks and also screens littered around my house. My wife and I have both noticed over the last couple of years that their usefulness seems to have diminished a lot. They used to seem much "smarter." Now, basically, they can tell me the time, set a timer, play music with like 65% accuracy in playing what I want, and tell me the weather outside. It's possible that they were always this bad and the novelty wore off, but it seems like the service just degraded. I assumed that both Amazon and Google were underwhelmed by how much actual revenue these kinds of devices produced, so they were starving the backend services. Now it looks like both companies are hoping that Generative AI is going to make them more valuable [0] [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/01/google-reshuffles-assistant-unit-again-to-supercharge-it-with-ai.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/01/google-reshuffles-assistant-...
- eitally 3y ago
  GenAI absolutely will make them more useful. Even just for normal Q&A functions. I installed a shortcut to Bard on my phone and several times have compared the results when I ask the Google Assistant a question (on a Google Home) with what I get from Bard. The sooner they can get Bard responding to Google Assistant queries, the better.
  - foobarian 3y ago
    There is no way that will last without monetization. AI is expensive to run even on evaluation side.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- mrweasel 3y ago
  > I assumed that both Amazon and Google were underwhelmed by how much actual revenue these kinds of devices produced, so they were starving the backend services. For years I've been questioning the usefulness of voice assistants and have been mostly ridiculed for it. Beyond a few edge cases, like setting a timer when cooking or use in cars, I still don't see people actually using them all that much. So I'd agree that the potential revenue was vastly overestimate, nor are the lack of a powerful voice assistant going to hurt sales of devices such as phones. The devices which can only be used as a voice assistant is going to go away obviously.
dougmwne 3y ago
I’m assuming that this represents a massive pivot into LLM assistants and these jobs were in support of the legacy system which will be deprecated soon.
- black_13 3y ago
  [dead]
- dboreham 3y ago
  Or..."no path to revenue"?
- pandacake 3y ago
  The legacy system is the system. Amazon fired a bunch of people this time last year because it was supposed to have Titan. Titan is completely underwhelming, and so they had to wait. Hence the PR around "democratizing LLMs." Unless Amazon is using Llama2 (because Titan utterly failed), there is no alternative. GPT-3.5 (the free version) can easily out perform anything Amazon has, and anything Alexa can do. An utter failure by Dave Limp and company.
cmpalmer52 3y ago
I’ve got about six Echo devices that I use basically as speakers, timers, grocery lists, weather radios, and some home control (lights and thermostats). I haven’t explored new features or asked it general questions in a while, but what I do use them for, I would miss. It’s become second nature to say “Alexa, seven minute timer” while I’m cooking. Or “Alexa, add soy sauce to the shopping list” when I open the fridge and pull out an almost empty bottle.
- madhato 3y ago
  Yup, exactly what we use it for and also to check the time. I always notice the lack of Alexa when I'm on vacation and have to get out of bed to turn on/off all the lights.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Yeah the issue is that you're never going to spend money through a voice interface, which is I think what they were hoping. The other big issue is that it's not smart enough for any random request to work, so you just learn a few useful ones (timers, music, thermostat maybe...) and stick with those. I think things might change when/if they hook up ChatGPT-level AI to them... but I still wouldn't spend money that way.
  - cmpalmer52 3y ago
    I have ordered dog treats through my Echo. “Alexa, reorder Charlie Bears” but you have to audibly enter a PIN, if I recall correctly. Eh, I might do it again, but it never occurs to me. But you’re spot on about learning commands instead of it understanding randomly phrased requests.
ssijak 3y ago
If Apple is smart, they will just integrate LLMs into Siri and across the iOS, macOS, speakers and TV and own everybody in "personal assistant" space. We already have very powerful devices in our hand (iPhone), on our desks (macs), around the house (speakers/tv), just integrate the latest AI tech into them in a smart and thoughtful way and it can be epic.
- Swizec 3y ago
  > they will just integrate LLMs into Siri and across the iOS, macOS Latest autocorrect is already based on LLMs. https://9to5mac.com/2023/11/14/ios-17-2-disable-inline-text-predictions/ https://9to5mac.com/2023/11/14/ios-17-2-disable-inline-text-... > just integrate the latest AI tech into them The Ultra 2 watch has a GPU (neural engine) that can run on-device Siri. Works great, I've been able to run basic commands like setting timers and local shortcuts in areas with no cell reception.
- kweingar 3y ago
  I hear lots of people saying this, but I’m not sure why we assume that Apple is the best positioned to take advantage of this. They have had powerful devices with best-in-class integration for many years now, and Siri is still a frustrating experience and lags significantly behind competing voice assistants. Competitors also have access to LLMs, and competing ecosystems are maturing (e.g. Samsung, Google). I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple makes waves with AI, but I also wouldn’t say they’re particularly more likely to do it than anybody else.
- flatline 3y ago
  I’m sure the big tech companies are working on exactly this and trimming resources from other areas, both from a simple logistics standpoint and from conversations I’ve had with folks who work (or worked) for these places doing AI. I personally don’t think LLMs are anywhere near ready for this type of rollout, so it will be a while before we see results. The cost of something like GPT 3.5 deployed at scale is tremendous. The censoring of responses will make it an obstreperous assistant, unless this has gotten considerably better in the last few months. And are we all just going to accept hallucinated results over something that is either vetted or clearly misunderstood? I don’t even know how far away we are from sufficiently powerful TPUs that fit a mobile case and power profile. But I do think this is likely to be the next big mobile advancement, however far off it may be.
ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
I worked in the Amazon Alexa division. The level of incompetence coupled with arrogance was astounding. Many of the people running Alexa had been there since 2012. Its was tyranny by those who started in that organization first. Backstabbing, politics, bad engineering, nepotistic promotions. The scientists were so far behind, almost all models were off the shelf implementations pulled from Github. Huge amounts of capital flushed down the drain. The flip side might be that Alexa was ahead of its time, and that the ML capabilities werent there. But I bet Alexa spent more than OpenAI by a huge margin. Amazon's fundamental flaw is trying to solve innovative business problems with incremental improvement. This only works in operations heavy businesses, like retail and AWS. AWS is really just extremely competent operations on top of server management. The whole company is a meat grinder, poor technical implementations with an army of SDEs keeping it running. It definitely works, they ship product, but the company is underperforming the S&P for five+ years now. Walmart has higher shareholder returns. They need to flush out the legacy employees and make room for hungry young workers.
- dan_quixote 3y ago
  Maybe all the back-stabbing and nepotism was data-driven[1]? [1] https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/how-do-you-become-a-data-driven-organization/ https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/how-do-you...
  - goostavos 3y ago
    Ha! I was there for 6 years. The "data" at Amazon is really just "whatever the management chain wants" for their empire building purposes. If you help them in this goal, you go up, if you get in their way, you go out.
    - pandacake 3y ago
      Exactly. The data is "cooked." We are literally told to make the numbers work, or else.
- tyingq 3y ago
bentt 3y ago
They must have tried hooking Alexa up to LLMs with Whisper-like speech recognition. I can only imagine the cost projections of rolling that out were astronomical. Plus, everyone that uses Alexa daily counts on it acting in the same dumb ways it always does. Wouldn't be surprised to see them roll out a new optional Alexa OS upgrade that you can opt into which has a subscription fee attached and provides AI coolness.
itqwertz 3y ago
Former Alexa Skill developer here. I gave it a shot for a year as a potential source of side income and released about 10 skills publicly (+20 more are half-done or abandoned). I've learned quite a bit about this platform over the past few years. I'd say the only positives I got out of it are a monthly $50 credit on AWS and sporadic surveys that netted me anywhere from $5 - $50 each. My notes: - VUI is a terrible interface. There are too many variables (foreign accents, volume, word recognition, etc.) that just make it clunky and unusable. Testing and debugging in the Alexa Console does not work 100% like on a real device. - The ISPs (In-Skill-Products) are confusing to developers and users. The documentation is often wrong. - The Alexa forum posts are rarely addressed by anyone at Amazon. Instead, you start to see fellow developers venting their frustrations. - The intent model and lack of state machine makes it incredibly difficult to make a skill worth someone paying for it. It wasn't uncommon for testing to work flawlessly and then the published skill would be so spotty as to be unusable. Imagine being in the middle of an Alexa game and then unceremoniously receiving a the default help response (required for Alexa skills) that restarts your progress. - Alexa doesn't work like people expect it to. Again, the intent/slot paradigm is pretty terrible. There's a lot of grunt work to have it even recognize slight variations of slots, so you end up with a huge list of sample intents users could potentially use. - Internationalization is a HUGE pain. There are different availabilities for ISPs, Alexa services, etc. - The Alexa Console is very clunky. Today (just like every day), I loaded the Analytics for one of my skills and got a 500 error. Reloading two or three times usually solves this issue, but c'mon! - Good luck trying to market your skill. You could game the system by publishing updates or implementing new Alexa features, but getting your skill onto someone's account is basically a guessing game of what will work or not. - Amazon Skills are not very profitable for individual developers. This puts the platform in jeopardy, as only the big players care enough to have their brand out there and sole developers don't make enough to make useful Alexa skills. - Other skill developers could just copy your skill and publish it! The certification process is weird and oftentimes seems to be arbitrary. There's more I could gripe about, but I've abandoned the platform. I suspect that Amazon's real product was the unfettered access to real-world speech data. By having a surveillance device in a user's home, they were able to collect data and train their own software.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
stronglikedan 3y ago
Alexa may not be the most capable voice assistant, but it is the most reliable. I use it and a few others daily for different things, and have never once got a random "I'm sorry, I can't do that right now" or "something went wrong try again in a few seconds". Also, it's the only one that I know of that can text reminders to me. I hope they don't ruin it.
- deepspace 3y ago
  We have both a Google thingy and an Alexa in the bedroom, used almost solely as alarm clocks. I use Alexa, my partner uses Google. Alexa works just about perfectly, setting, unsetting and snoozing alarms as needed. But Google is almost comically incompetent. "Hey google, set an alarm for 4:20 am" -- "Alarm set for 8 pm". When Alexa starts ringing, I can quietly say "stop" or "snooze". To get Google's attention when it is making noise, both of us have to scream at it more ofte than not.
  - jatins 3y ago
    Yeah I think Home significantly deteriorates with time. - refuses to understand English at times (maybe it's picking some weird localisation) - will not hear. Period. Literally have to shut the power couple times.
  - beembeem 3y ago
    Sounds like the Google product is doing its job - awaking you and getting you out of bed :)
oidar 3y ago
I tried to replace my Amazon Echo devices with Apple Homepod devices - but my wife wasn't having it. We just wanted whoever was in the room - even if it didn't recognize the voice - to add things to the shopping list. But nope. You have to have an apple device that's been trained on your voice to add things to the shopping list. I'm still looking for another solution so I can get out of the hell of maintaining Alexa's random new notification setting of the day. I really hate all the new "suggestions" and new crap they keep shoving down your throat with no option to turn it off. I would pay a subscription to turn that it off the annoyance, but there is no option for it.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38305097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38305097
JCharante 3y ago
To be honest I really liked Alexa with Ring. I know there's controversy with Ring, but it's just amazing how I can setup some cameras outside my home and then buy cheap alexa monitors to place around the house which show a camera preview whenever there's movement detected. In the past this would have required much more hardware that would have cost thousands.
- pandacake 3y ago
  And then people can hack into it (because it isn't that difficult), and you don't know your data/service is compromised because Amazon nor Ring discloses that to you.
  - JCharante 3y ago
    Is it really that easy? I don't know but imagine Amazon has a bug bounty program for that.
fuddle 3y ago
Considering how cheap they sell their home smart speakers, I can't imagine it's a very profitable division.
thatgerhard 3y ago
with things like chatgpt all of these assistant techs were immediately outdated.. I wouldn't have expected anything less that dumping whole old departments and starting over.
someonehere 3y ago
I stayed in the Circa hotel recently. They have an Amazon Show on the nightstand. It does nothing in terms of automation. It’s just there to replace the in room phone, show weather and nothing else. Can’t recall as it was very limited when I tried interacting with the voice assistant. I haven’t seen Alexa evolve that much but maybe someone who worked at Amazon can give more on what’s evolved.
- pandacake 3y ago
  FYI, it listens.

81 points by dmschulman 3y ago

I own a few Alexa devices, and I like them more or less, but doesn't seem like they(amazon) have invested much in making them truly useful devices anymore - the first few times you could talk to them were cool - but after that novelty wore off, the products seem to have stagnated quite a bit - seems the market agrees.

ghaff 3y ago
It's not really specific to Amazon. Voice assistants are a novelty and mildly useful thing but I mostly use them for a few very specific and non-critical things. In something like my car where they could be very useful, they mostly can't handle the more complicated queries that would actually be valuable to do completely hands-free. If I had to give up voice assistants tomorrow, I'd pretty much shrug and move on. Honestly, Kindles aren't that different. I like them (and my iPad) for traveling but I'm not sure ebooks have been the revolution that some thought they would be.
kemiller2002 3y ago
Our big thing we used them for at my place is vision assistance items. My gf is vision impaired, and it's much easier for it to read things to her, turn on lights etc. It sounds stupid and small, but it really helps her.
gumby 3y ago
Alexa (and the google equivalent) were an over-exuberant experiment. Speech is an interaction mode, not an all-encompassing one, and also a low-bandwidth one, so a device centered on it can't ever be a general computing device. Amazon tried to think a bit more broadly by having other on-keybaord interaction modes (buttons, which were really just clutter because their use was infrequent, and their wand, which was actually pretty handy) but again, didn't integrate it deeply into the rest of their world, so died due to lack of imagination. Google's thing is even more stark because it had no primary raison d'etre so I only ever saw one in the wild and it was at a google employee's home! Apple went the other way, making a speaker that you could also talk to. Of course Siri is such crap that it's fundamentally "un-sirious" too. But speech is not a terrible adjunct. I often use speech to control my watch (start a workout, set a timer, what's the weather outside) bc the screen is so tiny and the controls so few. It sometimes tells me things if I am wearing airpods. But I have the watch cranked down to only provide me with a few things, mostly by glancing at it after it taps me. And who would design a tap-only interface?

brycewray 3y ago

Dupe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38305097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38305097

rickspencer3 3y ago

I went all in on Google home, with the little pucks and also screens littered around my house. My wife and I have both noticed over the last couple of years that their usefulness seems to have diminished a lot. They used to seem much "smarter." Now, basically, they can tell me the time, set a timer, play music with like 65% accuracy in playing what I want, and tell me the weather outside. It's possible that they were always this bad and the novelty wore off, but it seems like the service just degraded. I assumed that both Amazon and Google were underwhelmed by how much actual revenue these kinds of devices produced, so they were starving the backend services. Now it looks like both companies are hoping that Generative AI is going to make them more valuable [0] [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/01/google-reshuffles-assistant-unit-again-to-supercharge-it-with-ai.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/01/google-reshuffles-assistant-...

eitally 3y ago
GenAI absolutely will make them more useful. Even just for normal Q&A functions. I installed a shortcut to Bard on my phone and several times have compared the results when I ask the Google Assistant a question (on a Google Home) with what I get from Bard. The sooner they can get Bard responding to Google Assistant queries, the better.
- foobarian 3y ago
  There is no way that will last without monetization. AI is expensive to run even on evaluation side.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
mrweasel 3y ago
> I assumed that both Amazon and Google were underwhelmed by how much actual revenue these kinds of devices produced, so they were starving the backend services. For years I've been questioning the usefulness of voice assistants and have been mostly ridiculed for it. Beyond a few edge cases, like setting a timer when cooking or use in cars, I still don't see people actually using them all that much. So I'd agree that the potential revenue was vastly overestimate, nor are the lack of a powerful voice assistant going to hurt sales of devices such as phones. The devices which can only be used as a voice assistant is going to go away obviously.

dougmwne 3y ago

I’m assuming that this represents a massive pivot into LLM assistants and these jobs were in support of the legacy system which will be deprecated soon.

black_13 3y ago
[dead]
dboreham 3y ago
Or..."no path to revenue"?
pandacake 3y ago
The legacy system is the system. Amazon fired a bunch of people this time last year because it was supposed to have Titan. Titan is completely underwhelming, and so they had to wait. Hence the PR around "democratizing LLMs." Unless Amazon is using Llama2 (because Titan utterly failed), there is no alternative. GPT-3.5 (the free version) can easily out perform anything Amazon has, and anything Alexa can do. An utter failure by Dave Limp and company.

cmpalmer52 3y ago

I’ve got about six Echo devices that I use basically as speakers, timers, grocery lists, weather radios, and some home control (lights and thermostats). I haven’t explored new features or asked it general questions in a while, but what I do use them for, I would miss. It’s become second nature to say “Alexa, seven minute timer” while I’m cooking. Or “Alexa, add soy sauce to the shopping list” when I open the fridge and pull out an almost empty bottle.

madhato 3y ago
Yup, exactly what we use it for and also to check the time. I always notice the lack of Alexa when I'm on vacation and have to get out of bed to turn on/off all the lights.
IshKebab 3y ago
Yeah the issue is that you're never going to spend money through a voice interface, which is I think what they were hoping. The other big issue is that it's not smart enough for any random request to work, so you just learn a few useful ones (timers, music, thermostat maybe...) and stick with those. I think things might change when/if they hook up ChatGPT-level AI to them... but I still wouldn't spend money that way.
- cmpalmer52 3y ago
  I have ordered dog treats through my Echo. “Alexa, reorder Charlie Bears” but you have to audibly enter a PIN, if I recall correctly. Eh, I might do it again, but it never occurs to me. But you’re spot on about learning commands instead of it understanding randomly phrased requests.

ssijak 3y ago

If Apple is smart, they will just integrate LLMs into Siri and across the iOS, macOS, speakers and TV and own everybody in "personal assistant" space. We already have very powerful devices in our hand (iPhone), on our desks (macs), around the house (speakers/tv), just integrate the latest AI tech into them in a smart and thoughtful way and it can be epic.

Swizec 3y ago
> they will just integrate LLMs into Siri and across the iOS, macOS Latest autocorrect is already based on LLMs. https://9to5mac.com/2023/11/14/ios-17-2-disable-inline-text-predictions/ https://9to5mac.com/2023/11/14/ios-17-2-disable-inline-text-... > just integrate the latest AI tech into them The Ultra 2 watch has a GPU (neural engine) that can run on-device Siri. Works great, I've been able to run basic commands like setting timers and local shortcuts in areas with no cell reception.
kweingar 3y ago
I hear lots of people saying this, but I’m not sure why we assume that Apple is the best positioned to take advantage of this. They have had powerful devices with best-in-class integration for many years now, and Siri is still a frustrating experience and lags significantly behind competing voice assistants. Competitors also have access to LLMs, and competing ecosystems are maturing (e.g. Samsung, Google). I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple makes waves with AI, but I also wouldn’t say they’re particularly more likely to do it than anybody else.
flatline 3y ago
I’m sure the big tech companies are working on exactly this and trimming resources from other areas, both from a simple logistics standpoint and from conversations I’ve had with folks who work (or worked) for these places doing AI. I personally don’t think LLMs are anywhere near ready for this type of rollout, so it will be a while before we see results. The cost of something like GPT 3.5 deployed at scale is tremendous. The censoring of responses will make it an obstreperous assistant, unless this has gotten considerably better in the last few months. And are we all just going to accept hallucinated results over something that is either vetted or clearly misunderstood? I don’t even know how far away we are from sufficiently powerful TPUs that fit a mobile case and power profile. But I do think this is likely to be the next big mobile advancement, however far off it may be.

ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago

I worked in the Amazon Alexa division. The level of incompetence coupled with arrogance was astounding. Many of the people running Alexa had been there since 2012. Its was tyranny by those who started in that organization first. Backstabbing, politics, bad engineering, nepotistic promotions. The scientists were so far behind, almost all models were off the shelf implementations pulled from Github. Huge amounts of capital flushed down the drain. The flip side might be that Alexa was ahead of its time, and that the ML capabilities werent there. But I bet Alexa spent more than OpenAI by a huge margin. Amazon's fundamental flaw is trying to solve innovative business problems with incremental improvement. This only works in operations heavy businesses, like retail and AWS. AWS is really just extremely competent operations on top of server management. The whole company is a meat grinder, poor technical implementations with an army of SDEs keeping it running. It definitely works, they ship product, but the company is underperforming the S&P for five+ years now. Walmart has higher shareholder returns. They need to flush out the legacy employees and make room for hungry young workers.

dan_quixote 3y ago
Maybe all the back-stabbing and nepotism was data-driven[1]? [1] https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/how-do-you-become-a-data-driven-organization/ https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/how-do-you...
- goostavos 3y ago
  Ha! I was there for 6 years. The "data" at Amazon is really just "whatever the management chain wants" for their empire building purposes. If you help them in this goal, you go up, if you get in their way, you go out.
  - pandacake 3y ago
    Exactly. The data is "cooked." We are literally told to make the numbers work, or else.
tyingq 3y ago

bentt 3y ago

They must have tried hooking Alexa up to LLMs with Whisper-like speech recognition. I can only imagine the cost projections of rolling that out were astronomical. Plus, everyone that uses Alexa daily counts on it acting in the same dumb ways it always does. Wouldn't be surprised to see them roll out a new optional Alexa OS upgrade that you can opt into which has a subscription fee attached and provides AI coolness.

itqwertz 3y ago

Former Alexa Skill developer here. I gave it a shot for a year as a potential source of side income and released about 10 skills publicly (+20 more are half-done or abandoned). I've learned quite a bit about this platform over the past few years. I'd say the only positives I got out of it are a monthly $50 credit on AWS and sporadic surveys that netted me anywhere from $5 - $50 each. My notes: - VUI is a terrible interface. There are too many variables (foreign accents, volume, word recognition, etc.) that just make it clunky and unusable. Testing and debugging in the Alexa Console does not work 100% like on a real device. - The ISPs (In-Skill-Products) are confusing to developers and users. The documentation is often wrong. - The Alexa forum posts are rarely addressed by anyone at Amazon. Instead, you start to see fellow developers venting their frustrations. - The intent model and lack of state machine makes it incredibly difficult to make a skill worth someone paying for it. It wasn't uncommon for testing to work flawlessly and then the published skill would be so spotty as to be unusable. Imagine being in the middle of an Alexa game and then unceremoniously receiving a the default help response (required for Alexa skills) that restarts your progress. - Alexa doesn't work like people expect it to. Again, the intent/slot paradigm is pretty terrible. There's a lot of grunt work to have it even recognize slight variations of slots, so you end up with a huge list of sample intents users could potentially use. - Internationalization is a HUGE pain. There are different availabilities for ISPs, Alexa services, etc. - The Alexa Console is very clunky. Today (just like every day), I loaded the Analytics for one of my skills and got a 500 error. Reloading two or three times usually solves this issue, but c'mon! - Good luck trying to market your skill. You could game the system by publishing updates or implementing new Alexa features, but getting your skill onto someone's account is basically a guessing game of what will work or not. - Amazon Skills are not very profitable for individual developers. This puts the platform in jeopardy, as only the big players care enough to have their brand out there and sole developers don't make enough to make useful Alexa skills. - Other skill developers could just copy your skill and publish it! The certification process is weird and oftentimes seems to be arbitrary. There's more I could gripe about, but I've abandoned the platform. I suspect that Amazon's real product was the unfettered access to real-world speech data. By having a surveillance device in a user's home, they were able to collect data and train their own software.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

stronglikedan 3y ago

Alexa may not be the most capable voice assistant, but it is the most reliable. I use it and a few others daily for different things, and have never once got a random "I'm sorry, I can't do that right now" or "something went wrong try again in a few seconds". Also, it's the only one that I know of that can text reminders to me. I hope they don't ruin it.

deepspace 3y ago
We have both a Google thingy and an Alexa in the bedroom, used almost solely as alarm clocks. I use Alexa, my partner uses Google. Alexa works just about perfectly, setting, unsetting and snoozing alarms as needed. But Google is almost comically incompetent. "Hey google, set an alarm for 4:20 am" -- "Alarm set for 8 pm". When Alexa starts ringing, I can quietly say "stop" or "snooze". To get Google's attention when it is making noise, both of us have to scream at it more ofte than not.
- jatins 3y ago
  Yeah I think Home significantly deteriorates with time. - refuses to understand English at times (maybe it's picking some weird localisation) - will not hear. Period. Literally have to shut the power couple times.
- beembeem 3y ago
  Sounds like the Google product is doing its job - awaking you and getting you out of bed :)

oidar 3y ago

I tried to replace my Amazon Echo devices with Apple Homepod devices - but my wife wasn't having it. We just wanted whoever was in the room - even if it didn't recognize the voice - to add things to the shopping list. But nope. You have to have an apple device that's been trained on your voice to add things to the shopping list. I'm still looking for another solution so I can get out of the hell of maintaining Alexa's random new notification setting of the day. I really hate all the new "suggestions" and new crap they keep shoving down your throat with no option to turn it off. I would pay a subscription to turn that it off the annoyance, but there is no option for it.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38305097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38305097

JCharante 3y ago

To be honest I really liked Alexa with Ring. I know there's controversy with Ring, but it's just amazing how I can setup some cameras outside my home and then buy cheap alexa monitors to place around the house which show a camera preview whenever there's movement detected. In the past this would have required much more hardware that would have cost thousands.

pandacake 3y ago
And then people can hack into it (because it isn't that difficult), and you don't know your data/service is compromised because Amazon nor Ring discloses that to you.
- JCharante 3y ago
  Is it really that easy? I don't know but imagine Amazon has a bug bounty program for that.

fuddle 3y ago

Considering how cheap they sell their home smart speakers, I can't imagine it's a very profitable division.

thatgerhard 3y ago

with things like chatgpt all of these assistant techs were immediately outdated.. I wouldn't have expected anything less that dumping whole old departments and starting over.

someonehere 3y ago

I stayed in the Circa hotel recently. They have an Amazon Show on the nightstand. It does nothing in terms of automation. It’s just there to replace the in room phone, show weather and nothing else. Can’t recall as it was very limited when I tried interacting with the voice assistant. I haven’t seen Alexa evolve that much but maybe someone who worked at Amazon can give more on what’s evolved.

pandacake 3y ago
FYI, it listens.