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Amazon virtually kills efforts to develop Alexa Skills

172 points by Stratoscope 3y ago

billy99k 3y ago
I just read an article about a 19-year old making $10,000/month from the Alexa developer incentive program. It's sad that this will be ripped out from him and other developers in a few months. I stopped trusting Amazon years ago when they banned my seller account and my business was shutdown overnight. After 15 years, I finally got my account back with no explanation. At this point, I no longer care and have moved on.
- lobsterthief 3y ago
  The same exact thing happened to me. How did you find out you got it back? Did they send you an email or something?
- AuthConnectFail 3y ago
  it's subsidy, personally feel like that shouldn't be your model for sustaining that is barely amazon's fault here, they did their part but there doesnt seem to be market around it
- digging 3y ago
  > 19-year old making $10,000/month from the Alexa developer incentive program. It's sad that this will be ripped out from him and other developers in a few months. "Sad" feels a little strong here
  - tiahura 3y ago
    Does it? I’d be inconsolable if I was that 19 year old or his girlfriend.
    - zamadatix 3y ago
      Based on the article the dude seems like he'd be less beat up about it than the comments here are on his behalf. He got 100k+ during his college years and it helped him land his first full time job. Hell, let most's problems be that a developer incentive program didn't live up to be a lifetime career replacement and I doubt they'll consider it an upset at all.
- akira2501 3y ago
  > It's sad that this will be ripped out from him and other developers in a few months. Diversify. Never rely on a single large monopolist for your only revenue stream.
- paxys 3y ago
  It was never a sustainable business. Amazon was burning cash in the hopes of somehow making Alexa profitable, but they have now realized that won't happen and are turning the faucet off. People should be happy that they were able to get in and make some cash while they could. What would you have Amazon do instead? Make these charity payments forever?
- geodel 3y ago
  Its unconscionable. The least Amazon could do for this poor kid is to at least write a check of $5.5M that would be roughly the amount they would make if they keep doing same thing till age of 65.
jmward01 3y ago
Alexa's value has been dropping for me a lot lately since they follow nearly every interaction with some sort of commercial. '10 minute timer set, while you wait I can....' This appears to be one more nail in the coffin for something that could be very promising. I think that for this segment to really take off Amazon/Google/Apple all need to start releasing usable stuff to the open source world. A good open source home server voice based back-end that can control open-source devices will start creating apps and drive exploration the space. Eventually it will find the killer apps that will truly kick-start things. The houses lost to people setting up their own back-end is likely very small and the returns could be very big.
- _factor 3y ago
  The best is a message notification in the bedroom at 2AM, or maybe it’s an update. I’m in the process of replacing it with HA voice with the atom boxes. It probably won’t be as good, but it’s time to jump ship.
  - joshstrange 3y ago
    Interesting. I use HA as my hub but haven’t been following closely with what’s possible. I’m going to have to grab one of these Atom Voice boxes and try it out. I’m increasingly infuriated with the Alex Echos. Specifically the “while you wait..” or “did you know…”. The only thing I trust the Echos to do is turn on/off devices, set timers, and set reminders (same as what I trust Siri for). I imagine with Atom you can probably hook up an LLM somewhere in the chain which would be awesome, especially if I can use a local model. Another thing I want to banish from my life is “An item on your subscribe and save is not available”, that’s it, that’s the message. What item? Doesn’t matter. What about if you ask? Alexa has no clue what you are talking about and the app is useless for this specific purpose and in general. In fact the app is horrible to work with, it’s slow and buggy. I want to find the developers of both the app and this “feature” and just ask them why they hate users. Alexa was neat for a while but I’ve replaced the music playing ability with Sonos which does a way better job and now I really wish Sonos had a HA Voice integration. I can stomach setting up these Atom boxes everywhere instead though.
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nextworddev 3y ago
I was an early Alexa PM for Skills back in 2017. Even back then when Alexa had all the hype and first mover advantage, it was extremely difficult to provide any meaningful traction to “Skills developers” for various reasons (friction in VUI, discoverability issues mainly) Fast forward to 2023 when OpenAI came up with GPT Store, it felt like a deja vu of Alexa skills in some sense. My understanding is that GPTs are also struggling to gain good traction. There are some fundamental reasons why conversational 3rd party platforms are hard. If there’s any interest I will write about it in the Enterprise AI substack (nextword.substack.com)
- jeremyjh 3y ago
  The problem is not discoverability. The problem is there is nothing there to be discovered that is useful or entertaining enough for people to pay money for. The only thing surprising here is that it took so long for Amazon to admit its a failure.
  - nextworddev 3y ago
    You need discoverability to incentivize innovators to add more value, which itself feeds back into the value of the overall ecosystem, etc. But yes, natural language as an interface requires higher activation energy versus GUI which hampers how much value Alexa Skills (and GPT) can provide.
    - criddell 3y ago
      You do need discoverability, but you also need a capable platform and things worth discovering. When I look at Amazon’s skills page, it’s a wasteland. Until there’s something worth surfacing, discoverability doesn’t really matter. That said, I do have two Echos in my house (and one Home Pod) and use them all the time for basic things.
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    I disagree. I have used Alexa and Google Assistant a lot and also developed an Alexa skill for controlling Dyson's robot vacuum cleaners, so I'm pretty familiar. The problem is that the set of supported operations are always MUCH smaller than the set of operations people randomly try. You might develop a skill with 200 commands or whatever and think you've covered everything, but people can up with thousands of possible commands just by guessing. This means if people just do "I'll try asking this..." then probably 80% of the time it won't work. That's an incredibly frustrating experience. You quickly give up and just stick to the features that you know work, and never try to find any new ones. But I also disagree that OpenAI has the same problem, because LLMs means you don't need to manually add thousands of possible commands, so any random request that people make is MUCH more likely to work.
deleted 3y ago
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mocha_nate 3y ago
“dozens” lol, is this a burn?
- hervature 3y ago
  Answered in 3rd paragraph of TFA: > The news has left dozens of Alexa Skills developers wondering if they have a future with Alexa, especially as Amazon preps a generative AI and subscription-based version of Alexa. "Dozens" may sound like a dig at Alexa's ecosystem, but it's an estimation based on a podcast from Skills developers Mark Tucker and Allen Firstenberg, who, in a recent podcast, agreed that "dozens" of third-party devs were contemplating if it's still worthwhile to develop Alexa skills
  - jgalt212 3y ago
    I think the author may also have been making an Arrested Development reference. In which case, bravo Scharon!
mparnisari 3y ago
I am willing to pay Amazon if it can give me an Echo Dot that can talk to me like ChatGPT can.
- draugadrotten 3y ago
  Willow https://heywillow.io/ https://heywillow.io/ and Home Assistant at your service - https://community.home-assistant.io/t/chatgpt-integration-for-home-assistant-enhance-your-smart-home-with-ai/553344 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/chatgpt-integration-fo...
- guizzy 3y ago
  It's not hard to make an Alexa skill that hooks up to an OpenAI API (or compatible) endpoint. This repo is a good starting point: https://github.com/k4l1sh/alexa-gpt https://github.com/k4l1sh/alexa-gpt
vishnugupta 3y ago
I called it out last year [1]; Amazon failed to monitze off of Alexa and it costs them quite something to keep its backend hardware & software up and running. Going by the rumours the layoff axe fell the hardest on Alexa division. And now we see this news about 3rd party apps. Next Alexa will be put on life-support and then stop it completely 3-5 years from now. It's good that they do have bluetooth and audio cable interface so the hardware won't be bricked. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35042440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35042440
- EcommerceFlow 3y ago
  I don't see amazon killing off Alexa given how incredible it could become with LLMs taking off.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - hx8 3y ago
    The issue with Alexa is no one successfully monetized it. How will LLMs improve monetization?
    - teeray 3y ago
      The article mentioned it: Alexa Pro or something which is a subscription to use the LLM-powered Alexa.
      - vishnugupta 3y ago
        It's highly unlikely that a typical end consumer will pay subscription fee just to have a conversation with a device. Not saying there won’t be niche domains where this is useful but it won't reach mass adoption to justify the costs to keep Alexa up and running. Maybe they can charge for LLM + Smart home features, perhaps there could be more takers? Either way they need to figure it out soon because the cost will keep accumulating and they can write them off only for so many quarters. It seems they had sold 500 million Alexa devices until last year [1]. Just the hardware infra to keep servicing them is massive; not to speak of developer cost. [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-has-sold-more-than-500-million-alexa-enabled-devices-drops-4-new-echo-products-140013808.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-has-sold-more-than-500...
blackeyeblitzar 3y ago
From everything I’ve heard, Alexa was an absolutely massive boondoggle inside Amazon, with literally thousands of engineers and hundreds of managers. It’s incredible to think that so many of them spent years there, growing through the ranks of Amazon, without ever building anything resembling a real business. This really shows exactly how unfair the playing field is for anyone competing with big tech - there’s no pressure for them to make money for years at a time, when everyone else has to actually fight to survive.
throwiforgtnlzy 3y ago
Alexa's platform is really, really bad in 4 dimensions: it's antiquated with limited fixed action patterns, it just doesn't work correctly, its skills aren't adequately maintained, and it's developer hostile. On the first part, if a skill doesn't support a precise sentence structure, it becomes difficult to use or simply doesn't support features users expect to use using natural language. On the second point, not all Alexa devices work with IPv6. I have an Echo Show 15 here that simply refuses to play BBC News and other "Flash Briefing" items when IPv6 is enabled. Really? It's 2024 now. Did the whole factory reset, reboot, and so forth dances. An LLM startup with enough partner biz dev/sales talent could combine IoT API integrations from enough manufacturers to side-step the boring and limited Apple Siri, Google Hello, and Amazon Alexa oligopoly hegemonies and self-destructive platforms like IFTTT to execute on a compelling, competing replacement making good on all 4 points. However, I don't think giving away computing resources for free is necessarily a scalable business model but it's fair to charge a reasonable micropayment subscription to host and run your code and data.
doubtfuluser 3y ago
I was quite bought in into the Alexa eco-system - but that changed over the past. I removed and sold every screen Alexa device I had in my house since it was such a distraction and did not simplify my day at all or bring value. Also the non screen devices really degraded in quality. I have the feeling that the speech reco got worse and also asking questions the answers I get are now more often miss than hit. Sometimes I ask something specific for countries and the moment it starts with „this is something I found and translated…“ I know the answer is not going to be relevant. The only reason I didn’t get rid of it is, that it’s an easy way for my kids to play their music. Otherwise I would have ditched them all
pmarreck 3y ago
I have a question. Why has it taken this long for a replacement for Alexa to show up? All we need is something hooked up to, say, ChatGPT that lets me control my house stuff, set timers, add to a shopping list etc... And it can generate JSON for all that which can then get picked up and relayed over the wire.
- outop 3y ago
  ChatGPT would be terrible at adding stuff to a shopping list.
  - wlonkly 3y ago
    But entertaining for a few minutes!
  - pmarreck 3y ago
    What makes you think that? It’s all about the prompting.
- imp0cat 3y ago
  Alexa is perfectly fine for that even without ChatGPT-like capabilities. The Skills situation might be a disaster, but if you just want to control devices in your home, it's great. The level of integration with pretty much anything is amazing.
  - pmarreck 3y ago
    I would really like it to be far more intelligent. For example, if I give it a request like “decorate all the lights in my house with Christmas colors“, it should know what to do.
- 3np 3y ago
  You can semi-DIY it already with Rhasspy + your choice of home automation stack (HomeAssistant or what-have-you). Rhasspy is probably what you're looking for. https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy Was discussed last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33705938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33705938 My only real issue in setting it up and running it has been finding appropriate microphones.
mastazi 3y ago
Apologies if this is OT. For a very long time (probably more than a year) I have been seeing the same link at the bottom of every single Ars Technica article; it is a link to a video titled "SITREP: F-16 replacement search a signal of F-35 fail?" Are other readers experiencing the same? If not, what could be the reason for targeting me? I am not involved in military tech or aviation, and I usually block tracking cookies so I don't expect the site to know much about who I am or what my interests are. I just find it odd that the footer of a publication like Ars Technica would remain unchanged for such a long time.
- AdamN 3y ago
  It probably converts well and they see no reason to update it ... or the intern turned off the cron job that was written in 2015 that is supposed to update the cross-links every day ...
- explaininjs 3y ago
  I see it too. Seems to just be an article they like. Perhaps they condition advertisements on referrers. Edit: I see now it's a video, meaning it's really just a flashy headline that gets you to click and immediately watch though an ad. They probably make quite a pretty penny off of that.
- 3np 3y ago
  Always the same discussion about the TV series Quantum Leap, here.
  - kkarakk 3y ago
    i wouldn't be surprised if the feature was just broken, ars website works really poorly
  - mastazi 3y ago
    oh yes that's right I see that as well, I notice it less because of the more benign topic. I just clicked on a few links from the home page and it seems to depend on the section the article is on (science, tech, gaming etc.), in the "tech" and "gadgets" sections I get the military plane video, when the article is categorised as "gaming" or "information technology" I get the Quantum Leap video, and when I'm reading articles in the "science" category I get a third video about Biomarkers in medical diagnosis.
MichaelMug 3y ago
It's not surprising to me. Alexa was entirely botched IMO. For example, I would ask Alexa "can my dog eat <X>". In the beginning it was not clear to me this was a third party skill. Then one day Alexa would respond with something like "nay, Dr. Wolf says ..." (I don't quite remember). I was surprised because who speaks like that? I then realized it was an Alexa Skill made by a third party developer. The developer later attempted to monetized this skill so you could only ask the question 3 times and after that it would bill you. Alexa has a lot of other issues. Every room in the house has an Alexa Echo Show. But the screen real estate is entirely wasted with useless stuff. Very limited customization. I'm in process of replacing my home automation with Lutron products. And the Alexa will soon be gone from my home. It seems like everything Amazon does is half-baked, but enough to get out the door. There is no polish at that company.
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  > And the Alexa Echo Shows in every room will soon become ewaste. Please try to donate to a local hacker space, nephew, give away on craiglist, but this just makes me depressed every time. :-( > It seems like everything Amazon does is half-baked, but enough to get out the door. There is no polish at that company. Isn't that more and more becoming the norm? Google immediately comes to mind too, and the only exception is probably Apple, but at times even they throw shit on the market that just doesn't feel polished at all. It's just that more often than not they actually try to make it right then, instead of letting it linger...
  - MichaelMug 3y ago
    "Thank you. I will consider donating. I did not mean to imply that I would throw them in the garbage. I meant more that I would take them to my city's electronics recycling drop-off.
  - ravetcofx 3y ago
    Apple HomePods are pretty half-baked with how shitty Siri, they have a very niche set of things they do but even that's not reliable because Siri likes to misinterpret
purplezooey 3y ago
Why does it seem like there is so much "fad-like appeal" even in the rungs of upper management at large companies. You see it now with AI. Diverting of resources away from projects that, only a few years ago, were yielding good results and could benefit from a refresh now. As recently as 2022, Amazon was giving away very nice AWS promotional credits for skills, and there are some very good ones. You see it with Google's new buildings. Stopping construction after a bad quarter?
- hibernator149 3y ago
  Upper management are just average people with better networking and less empathy. They fall for fads and FOMO just like everyone else.
  - candiodari 3y ago
    Generously you could say they're reacting to the "real danger". The danger to them personally is that someone else does better at a currently fancy project and appears more capable than them to others.
  - silviot 3y ago
    > Upper management are just average people with better networking and less empathy Very concise and to the point. I might print and hang this!
  - jajko 3y ago
    Average is downplaying their IQ IMHO, but I agree with the rest. And at the end, same result in both cases.
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      I dont know why your up-playing their IQ. there may not be a ton of forrest gump tier dummies, but they're often profoundly average people. I've done consulting at F500 companies and was consistently not-impressed by director levels and above, dudes in tech for 30 years and didn't have an understanding of what "production" meant. Outsourcing literally their basic day to day job responsibilities to Accenture and McKinsey to the point where pretty much anyone reading HN could have been in their role. A lot was "flash" -- looking good, speaking grandly, and sticking to broad approaches that they could assign to a technical senior manager or contributor. And a lot of the time, to be honest, that worked: sometimes you just gotta motivate people with big gestures. But once it became time to actually get outside of the box and generate new ideas they were stuffed shirts.
ahmeni 3y ago
Normal people don't want to have a conversation with their Alexa device. They want simple, reliable commands to do the common things in their household. Anyone who's tried to order something off Amazon through a screenless Echo knows the pain. Skills were always dead in the water the minute they required an AWS account and a Lambda deployment to get going. That's a miserable thing to develop (and an AWS account itself being a looming financial liability) and maintain even if you're familiar with all the inner junctions of Lambda and IAM.
- huytersd 3y ago
  Isn’t it just like Apple. You host the app on your own servers right? And you need a developer account to do all of that.
victorbjorklund 3y ago
It is sad. I like alexa and wish it would get more love to become more useful.
zmmmmm 3y ago
I get that Alexa skills weren't successful and aren't getting a lot of usage, but I am always surprised that these services are cited as being very expensive to maintain. For Amazon, what's the realistic cost in hosting these? Or is it that they have teams of people covering the security / oversight etc? At this juncture, I have to be sceptical that the reason they now want to kill it is because they effectively want to Sherlock them all by shipping LLM based AI functionality instead, and they want to ensure that nobody else does it on their platform before they can.
- 121789 3y ago
  In my experience there are many reasonable incentives that shut these things down. Execs don’t want the even small maintenance burden on already stretched-thin dev teams (low ROI and bad opportunity costs), and individual devs want to work on the most impactful projects.
rockbruno 3y ago
I use Alexa exclusively as a voice control feature for my Home Assistant server. If they allowed Alexa to process commands locally, the product would be a lot more attractive.
salamo 3y ago
I've been waiting for a while for the tech to catch up, but it should be more or less possible now to use Whisper and an LLM to run a virtual assistant locally. Virtual assistants always seemed like a privacy nightmare to me so I never pulled the trigger. But if it's all local? It would be a great product. No internet unless I turn on a physical switch, no ads, no monthly fee. Just do the thing I want you to do. Maybe at the moment it will still need to talk to my GPU. But we're getting there.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  Unfortunately you’d probably want a subscription to newer models that are trained on more relevant and new data. Basically the difference between a standalone GPS unit and an internet connected maps app - at first it doesn’t seem like you need anything new but slowly the world around it changes. But yea this seems like a great vision generally. I think that we’ll progress past a chat LLM to one that autogenerates UIs - several companies have already demoed this.
- everforward 3y ago
  You can duct tape together Whisper and GPT4All in a couple dozen lines of Python. It wasn't bad; I'm on a 3070 so it was slow, but tolerable (a couple seconds of latency up to 5 or so seconds for the full Whisper+Mistral7B pipeline). I named mine Jeeves, so at any point I could just "Ask Jeeves" (lol) and it would talk back to me. The TTS spoke slower than I would prefer, but I probably could have fixed it. I also should have prepended the prompt with something to encourage it to be brief. It often started reading out a couple of paragraphs of text.
captainmuon 3y ago
Seeing the fast development of AI in the last couple of years, it's incredible how stuck AI assistants are. Basic things like "Hey Google, turn up the volume" don't work. Just imagine what a good AI assistant could do with todays LLM tech. Actual things I would have used in the last two days: - Hey Google, what's the song that goes "da da da da da daaa da"? There are skeletons and elephants in the video? - Hey Siri, can you move all the windows of project XY to a fresh desktop? - Move all the shopping tabs to a new window. - Find the last contract draft for customer ABC.
- troupo 3y ago
  Many of those have nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with access points and integrations in applications and OS. But for everything else they do suck.
  - aurareturn 3y ago
    Giving AI access to OS APIs is trivial for Apple and Google. The problem has been that AI assistant were always too dumb to understand user requests. LLMs changed everything.
    - troupo 3y ago
      First, it's not as trivial to give access to OS APIs as you think. Second, giving access to APIs... gives you access to APIs, and that's it. Even the most advanced LLMs are dumb as shit when it comes to anything non-trivial in programming. What makes you think that a modern LLM will manage to translate "move tab X to a different window" into a dozen or more API calls with proper structures filled in, and in the correct order?
      - aurareturn 3y ago
        It's trivial. For example, most macOS apps can already get these permissions. Apple can grant special permissions for Siri quite easily. I don't sense that GPT4 is "dumb as shit". I sense that it's extremely capable and very close to changing everything if, for example, macOS completely integrates GPT4.
skeledrew 3y ago
Contrary to the article, I'd say Amazon does have some incentive, and definitely the money to keep this going as long as they want. What's missing is mindshare, because voice assistants are fundamentally uninteresting beyond queries and basic automation.
pinkmuffinere 3y ago
>"Dozens" may sound like a dig at Alexa's ecosystem, but it's an estimation based on a podcast from Skills developers Mark Tucker and Allen Firstenberg, who, in a recent podcast, agreed that "dozens" of third-party devs were contemplating if it's still worthwhile to develop Alexa skills. The casual summary wasn't stated as a hard fact or confirmed by Amazon but, rather, seemed like a rough and quick estimation based on the developers' familiarity with the Skills community. But with such minimal interest and money associated with Skills, dozens isn't an implausible figure either. lol ya, I thought the title was a joke, but apparently their best guess is that there were dozens of developers. This is like a punchline from XKCD.
whoitwas 3y ago
I've never seen any value for me in the Amazon spy devices. They listen to your home and play ads. Amazon profits, not me. For me, device has less utility than an electric can opener.
nailer 3y ago
> The news has left dozens of Alexa Skills developers wondering if they have a future with Alexa, especially as Amazon preps a generative AI It's here now, they just haven't announced it. The Alexa devices at my home can answer arbitrary questions. "What is the round shape on top of the world trade center?" "That is the one world observatory" etc. There's a weird thing where some questions get picked up by the non-LLM. "how much will it rain today?" gets answered by the old weather app with a nonsensical answer like "it will rain today at 4PM"
drpossum 3y ago
I used it for grocery lists until a few months ago when they a) started putting ads in for when I was shopping b) discontinued the web interface which was far more convenient for me. I literally went back to pen and paper because of this endless closing off and injecting ads garbage.
- nickburns 3y ago
  i know, i know, M$!!1!111!!!! but check out To Do for this and other list making purposes. shared, synced family grocery list is a must in our household now. yes, items must be added 'manually.' but they can simply be checked/unchecked rather than deleting (which also provides a convenient pantry inventory review just before shopping trips).
  - angra_mainyu 3y ago
    Is this satire?
    - nickburns 3y ago
      no, it's actually a suggestion for adults that grocery shop for themselves and their families.
- _xerces_ 3y ago
  That was the killer feature for me. Being able to yell "Alexa, put milk on the list" right as I poured out the last drop was very convenient. For larger lists like recipe ingredients I used the web interface. I still use it via the Windows app (which insists on grouping my items even though I keep turning it off) and my phone, but the experience and interface has gotten worse over time. I wonder if I can get similar functionality from Google.
  - julianz 3y ago
    You definitely can get Google to mark one of your Keep notes as the designated "shopping list" and then add items at the top of it when you ask it to, it works pretty well.
wkat4242 3y ago
Makes sense. I'm sure they're working on a next gen Alexa based on LLM.
ralphc 3y ago
I wrote Alexa skills for personal, household use, but it was hard to find use cases that audio was faster than scanning a list of things like others had mentioned. My wife and I are NASCAR fans so I did have a skill where you could just ask "what's the weather at the track" and, based on today's date it would know where the next race was and give back weather for that location. But beyond the things mentioned here, other places have scaled back their free APIs for things like weather and other useful services. What really killed the interest was the nagging feeling that we had that Alexa was listening more than it should, so we keep it off most of the time so you have to go to it, have it listen, ask your question then turn listening back off.
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172 points by Stratoscope 3y ago

I just read an article about a 19-year old making $10,000/month from the Alexa developer incentive program. It's sad that this will be ripped out from him and other developers in a few months. I stopped trusting Amazon years ago when they banned my seller account and my business was shutdown overnight. After 15 years, I finally got my account back with no explanation. At this point, I no longer care and have moved on.

lobsterthief 3y ago
The same exact thing happened to me. How did you find out you got it back? Did they send you an email or something?
AuthConnectFail 3y ago
it's subsidy, personally feel like that shouldn't be your model for sustaining that is barely amazon's fault here, they did their part but there doesnt seem to be market around it
digging 3y ago
> 19-year old making $10,000/month from the Alexa developer incentive program. It's sad that this will be ripped out from him and other developers in a few months. "Sad" feels a little strong here
- tiahura 3y ago
  Does it? I’d be inconsolable if I was that 19 year old or his girlfriend.
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    Based on the article the dude seems like he'd be less beat up about it than the comments here are on his behalf. He got 100k+ during his college years and it helped him land his first full time job. Hell, let most's problems be that a developer incentive program didn't live up to be a lifetime career replacement and I doubt they'll consider it an upset at all.
akira2501 3y ago
> It's sad that this will be ripped out from him and other developers in a few months. Diversify. Never rely on a single large monopolist for your only revenue stream.
paxys 3y ago
It was never a sustainable business. Amazon was burning cash in the hopes of somehow making Alexa profitable, but they have now realized that won't happen and are turning the faucet off. People should be happy that they were able to get in and make some cash while they could. What would you have Amazon do instead? Make these charity payments forever?
geodel 3y ago
Its unconscionable. The least Amazon could do for this poor kid is to at least write a check of $5.5M that would be roughly the amount they would make if they keep doing same thing till age of 65.

jmward01 3y ago

Alexa's value has been dropping for me a lot lately since they follow nearly every interaction with some sort of commercial. '10 minute timer set, while you wait I can....' This appears to be one more nail in the coffin for something that could be very promising. I think that for this segment to really take off Amazon/Google/Apple all need to start releasing usable stuff to the open source world. A good open source home server voice based back-end that can control open-source devices will start creating apps and drive exploration the space. Eventually it will find the killer apps that will truly kick-start things. The houses lost to people setting up their own back-end is likely very small and the returns could be very big.

_factor 3y ago
The best is a message notification in the bedroom at 2AM, or maybe it’s an update. I’m in the process of replacing it with HA voice with the atom boxes. It probably won’t be as good, but it’s time to jump ship.
- joshstrange 3y ago
  Interesting. I use HA as my hub but haven’t been following closely with what’s possible. I’m going to have to grab one of these Atom Voice boxes and try it out. I’m increasingly infuriated with the Alex Echos. Specifically the “while you wait..” or “did you know…”. The only thing I trust the Echos to do is turn on/off devices, set timers, and set reminders (same as what I trust Siri for). I imagine with Atom you can probably hook up an LLM somewhere in the chain which would be awesome, especially if I can use a local model. Another thing I want to banish from my life is “An item on your subscribe and save is not available”, that’s it, that’s the message. What item? Doesn’t matter. What about if you ask? Alexa has no clue what you are talking about and the app is useless for this specific purpose and in general. In fact the app is horrible to work with, it’s slow and buggy. I want to find the developers of both the app and this “feature” and just ask them why they hate users. Alexa was neat for a while but I’ve replaced the music playing ability with Sonos which does a way better job and now I really wish Sonos had a HA Voice integration. I can stomach setting up these Atom boxes everywhere instead though.
- 3y ago

nextworddev 3y ago

I was an early Alexa PM for Skills back in 2017. Even back then when Alexa had all the hype and first mover advantage, it was extremely difficult to provide any meaningful traction to “Skills developers” for various reasons (friction in VUI, discoverability issues mainly) Fast forward to 2023 when OpenAI came up with GPT Store, it felt like a deja vu of Alexa skills in some sense. My understanding is that GPTs are also struggling to gain good traction. There are some fundamental reasons why conversational 3rd party platforms are hard. If there’s any interest I will write about it in the Enterprise AI substack (nextword.substack.com)

jeremyjh 3y ago
The problem is not discoverability. The problem is there is nothing there to be discovered that is useful or entertaining enough for people to pay money for. The only thing surprising here is that it took so long for Amazon to admit its a failure.
- nextworddev 3y ago
  You need discoverability to incentivize innovators to add more value, which itself feeds back into the value of the overall ecosystem, etc. But yes, natural language as an interface requires higher activation energy versus GUI which hampers how much value Alexa Skills (and GPT) can provide.
  - criddell 3y ago
    You do need discoverability, but you also need a capable platform and things worth discovering. When I look at Amazon’s skills page, it’s a wasteland. Until there’s something worth surfacing, discoverability doesn’t really matter. That said, I do have two Echos in my house (and one Home Pod) and use them all the time for basic things.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  I disagree. I have used Alexa and Google Assistant a lot and also developed an Alexa skill for controlling Dyson's robot vacuum cleaners, so I'm pretty familiar. The problem is that the set of supported operations are always MUCH smaller than the set of operations people randomly try. You might develop a skill with 200 commands or whatever and think you've covered everything, but people can up with thousands of possible commands just by guessing. This means if people just do "I'll try asking this..." then probably 80% of the time it won't work. That's an incredibly frustrating experience. You quickly give up and just stick to the features that you know work, and never try to find any new ones. But I also disagree that OpenAI has the same problem, because LLMs means you don't need to manually add thousands of possible commands, so any random request that people make is MUCH more likely to work.

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mocha_nate 3y ago

“dozens” lol, is this a burn?

hervature 3y ago
Answered in 3rd paragraph of TFA: > The news has left dozens of Alexa Skills developers wondering if they have a future with Alexa, especially as Amazon preps a generative AI and subscription-based version of Alexa. "Dozens" may sound like a dig at Alexa's ecosystem, but it's an estimation based on a podcast from Skills developers Mark Tucker and Allen Firstenberg, who, in a recent podcast, agreed that "dozens" of third-party devs were contemplating if it's still worthwhile to develop Alexa skills
- jgalt212 3y ago
  I think the author may also have been making an Arrested Development reference. In which case, bravo Scharon!

mparnisari 3y ago

I am willing to pay Amazon if it can give me an Echo Dot that can talk to me like ChatGPT can.

draugadrotten 3y ago
Willow https://heywillow.io/ https://heywillow.io/ and Home Assistant at your service - https://community.home-assistant.io/t/chatgpt-integration-for-home-assistant-enhance-your-smart-home-with-ai/553344 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/chatgpt-integration-fo...
guizzy 3y ago
It's not hard to make an Alexa skill that hooks up to an OpenAI API (or compatible) endpoint. This repo is a good starting point: https://github.com/k4l1sh/alexa-gpt https://github.com/k4l1sh/alexa-gpt

vishnugupta 3y ago

I called it out last year [1]; Amazon failed to monitze off of Alexa and it costs them quite something to keep its backend hardware & software up and running. Going by the rumours the layoff axe fell the hardest on Alexa division. And now we see this news about 3rd party apps. Next Alexa will be put on life-support and then stop it completely 3-5 years from now. It's good that they do have bluetooth and audio cable interface so the hardware won't be bricked. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35042440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35042440

EcommerceFlow 3y ago
I don't see amazon killing off Alexa given how incredible it could become with LLMs taking off.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hx8 3y ago
  The issue with Alexa is no one successfully monetized it. How will LLMs improve monetization?
  - teeray 3y ago
    The article mentioned it: Alexa Pro or something which is a subscription to use the LLM-powered Alexa.
    - vishnugupta 3y ago
      It's highly unlikely that a typical end consumer will pay subscription fee just to have a conversation with a device. Not saying there won’t be niche domains where this is useful but it won't reach mass adoption to justify the costs to keep Alexa up and running. Maybe they can charge for LLM + Smart home features, perhaps there could be more takers? Either way they need to figure it out soon because the cost will keep accumulating and they can write them off only for so many quarters. It seems they had sold 500 million Alexa devices until last year [1]. Just the hardware infra to keep servicing them is massive; not to speak of developer cost. [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-has-sold-more-than-500-million-alexa-enabled-devices-drops-4-new-echo-products-140013808.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-has-sold-more-than-500...

blackeyeblitzar 3y ago

From everything I’ve heard, Alexa was an absolutely massive boondoggle inside Amazon, with literally thousands of engineers and hundreds of managers. It’s incredible to think that so many of them spent years there, growing through the ranks of Amazon, without ever building anything resembling a real business. This really shows exactly how unfair the playing field is for anyone competing with big tech - there’s no pressure for them to make money for years at a time, when everyone else has to actually fight to survive.

throwiforgtnlzy 3y ago

Alexa's platform is really, really bad in 4 dimensions: it's antiquated with limited fixed action patterns, it just doesn't work correctly, its skills aren't adequately maintained, and it's developer hostile. On the first part, if a skill doesn't support a precise sentence structure, it becomes difficult to use or simply doesn't support features users expect to use using natural language. On the second point, not all Alexa devices work with IPv6. I have an Echo Show 15 here that simply refuses to play BBC News and other "Flash Briefing" items when IPv6 is enabled. Really? It's 2024 now. Did the whole factory reset, reboot, and so forth dances. An LLM startup with enough partner biz dev/sales talent could combine IoT API integrations from enough manufacturers to side-step the boring and limited Apple Siri, Google Hello, and Amazon Alexa oligopoly hegemonies and self-destructive platforms like IFTTT to execute on a compelling, competing replacement making good on all 4 points. However, I don't think giving away computing resources for free is necessarily a scalable business model but it's fair to charge a reasonable micropayment subscription to host and run your code and data.

doubtfuluser 3y ago

I was quite bought in into the Alexa eco-system - but that changed over the past. I removed and sold every screen Alexa device I had in my house since it was such a distraction and did not simplify my day at all or bring value. Also the non screen devices really degraded in quality. I have the feeling that the speech reco got worse and also asking questions the answers I get are now more often miss than hit. Sometimes I ask something specific for countries and the moment it starts with „this is something I found and translated…“ I know the answer is not going to be relevant. The only reason I didn’t get rid of it is, that it’s an easy way for my kids to play their music. Otherwise I would have ditched them all

pmarreck 3y ago

I have a question. Why has it taken this long for a replacement for Alexa to show up? All we need is something hooked up to, say, ChatGPT that lets me control my house stuff, set timers, add to a shopping list etc... And it can generate JSON for all that which can then get picked up and relayed over the wire.

outop 3y ago
ChatGPT would be terrible at adding stuff to a shopping list.
- wlonkly 3y ago
  But entertaining for a few minutes!
- pmarreck 3y ago
  What makes you think that? It’s all about the prompting.
imp0cat 3y ago
Alexa is perfectly fine for that even without ChatGPT-like capabilities. The Skills situation might be a disaster, but if you just want to control devices in your home, it's great. The level of integration with pretty much anything is amazing.
- pmarreck 3y ago
  I would really like it to be far more intelligent. For example, if I give it a request like “decorate all the lights in my house with Christmas colors“, it should know what to do.
3np 3y ago
You can semi-DIY it already with Rhasspy + your choice of home automation stack (HomeAssistant or what-have-you). Rhasspy is probably what you're looking for. https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy Was discussed last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33705938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33705938 My only real issue in setting it up and running it has been finding appropriate microphones.

mastazi 3y ago

Apologies if this is OT. For a very long time (probably more than a year) I have been seeing the same link at the bottom of every single Ars Technica article; it is a link to a video titled "SITREP: F-16 replacement search a signal of F-35 fail?" Are other readers experiencing the same? If not, what could be the reason for targeting me? I am not involved in military tech or aviation, and I usually block tracking cookies so I don't expect the site to know much about who I am or what my interests are. I just find it odd that the footer of a publication like Ars Technica would remain unchanged for such a long time.

AdamN 3y ago
It probably converts well and they see no reason to update it ... or the intern turned off the cron job that was written in 2015 that is supposed to update the cross-links every day ...
explaininjs 3y ago
I see it too. Seems to just be an article they like. Perhaps they condition advertisements on referrers. Edit: I see now it's a video, meaning it's really just a flashy headline that gets you to click and immediately watch though an ad. They probably make quite a pretty penny off of that.
3np 3y ago
Always the same discussion about the TV series Quantum Leap, here.
- kkarakk 3y ago
  i wouldn't be surprised if the feature was just broken, ars website works really poorly
- mastazi 3y ago
  oh yes that's right I see that as well, I notice it less because of the more benign topic. I just clicked on a few links from the home page and it seems to depend on the section the article is on (science, tech, gaming etc.), in the "tech" and "gadgets" sections I get the military plane video, when the article is categorised as "gaming" or "information technology" I get the Quantum Leap video, and when I'm reading articles in the "science" category I get a third video about Biomarkers in medical diagnosis.

MichaelMug 3y ago

It's not surprising to me. Alexa was entirely botched IMO. For example, I would ask Alexa "can my dog eat <X>". In the beginning it was not clear to me this was a third party skill. Then one day Alexa would respond with something like "nay, Dr. Wolf says ..." (I don't quite remember). I was surprised because who speaks like that? I then realized it was an Alexa Skill made by a third party developer. The developer later attempted to monetized this skill so you could only ask the question 3 times and after that it would bill you. Alexa has a lot of other issues. Every room in the house has an Alexa Echo Show. But the screen real estate is entirely wasted with useless stuff. Very limited customization. I'm in process of replacing my home automation with Lutron products. And the Alexa will soon be gone from my home. It seems like everything Amazon does is half-baked, but enough to get out the door. There is no polish at that company.

iforgotpassword 3y ago
> And the Alexa Echo Shows in every room will soon become ewaste. Please try to donate to a local hacker space, nephew, give away on craiglist, but this just makes me depressed every time. :-( > It seems like everything Amazon does is half-baked, but enough to get out the door. There is no polish at that company. Isn't that more and more becoming the norm? Google immediately comes to mind too, and the only exception is probably Apple, but at times even they throw shit on the market that just doesn't feel polished at all. It's just that more often than not they actually try to make it right then, instead of letting it linger...
- MichaelMug 3y ago
  "Thank you. I will consider donating. I did not mean to imply that I would throw them in the garbage. I meant more that I would take them to my city's electronics recycling drop-off.
- ravetcofx 3y ago
  Apple HomePods are pretty half-baked with how shitty Siri, they have a very niche set of things they do but even that's not reliable because Siri likes to misinterpret

purplezooey 3y ago

Why does it seem like there is so much "fad-like appeal" even in the rungs of upper management at large companies. You see it now with AI. Diverting of resources away from projects that, only a few years ago, were yielding good results and could benefit from a refresh now. As recently as 2022, Amazon was giving away very nice AWS promotional credits for skills, and there are some very good ones. You see it with Google's new buildings. Stopping construction after a bad quarter?

hibernator149 3y ago
Upper management are just average people with better networking and less empathy. They fall for fads and FOMO just like everyone else.
- candiodari 3y ago
  Generously you could say they're reacting to the "real danger". The danger to them personally is that someone else does better at a currently fancy project and appears more capable than them to others.
- silviot 3y ago
  > Upper management are just average people with better networking and less empathy Very concise and to the point. I might print and hang this!
- jajko 3y ago
  Average is downplaying their IQ IMHO, but I agree with the rest. And at the end, same result in both cases.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    I dont know why your up-playing their IQ. there may not be a ton of forrest gump tier dummies, but they're often profoundly average people. I've done consulting at F500 companies and was consistently not-impressed by director levels and above, dudes in tech for 30 years and didn't have an understanding of what "production" meant. Outsourcing literally their basic day to day job responsibilities to Accenture and McKinsey to the point where pretty much anyone reading HN could have been in their role. A lot was "flash" -- looking good, speaking grandly, and sticking to broad approaches that they could assign to a technical senior manager or contributor. And a lot of the time, to be honest, that worked: sometimes you just gotta motivate people with big gestures. But once it became time to actually get outside of the box and generate new ideas they were stuffed shirts.

ahmeni 3y ago

Normal people don't want to have a conversation with their Alexa device. They want simple, reliable commands to do the common things in their household. Anyone who's tried to order something off Amazon through a screenless Echo knows the pain. Skills were always dead in the water the minute they required an AWS account and a Lambda deployment to get going. That's a miserable thing to develop (and an AWS account itself being a looming financial liability) and maintain even if you're familiar with all the inner junctions of Lambda and IAM.

huytersd 3y ago
Isn’t it just like Apple. You host the app on your own servers right? And you need a developer account to do all of that.

victorbjorklund 3y ago

It is sad. I like alexa and wish it would get more love to become more useful.

zmmmmm 3y ago

I get that Alexa skills weren't successful and aren't getting a lot of usage, but I am always surprised that these services are cited as being very expensive to maintain. For Amazon, what's the realistic cost in hosting these? Or is it that they have teams of people covering the security / oversight etc? At this juncture, I have to be sceptical that the reason they now want to kill it is because they effectively want to Sherlock them all by shipping LLM based AI functionality instead, and they want to ensure that nobody else does it on their platform before they can.

121789 3y ago
In my experience there are many reasonable incentives that shut these things down. Execs don’t want the even small maintenance burden on already stretched-thin dev teams (low ROI and bad opportunity costs), and individual devs want to work on the most impactful projects.

rockbruno 3y ago

I use Alexa exclusively as a voice control feature for my Home Assistant server. If they allowed Alexa to process commands locally, the product would be a lot more attractive.

salamo 3y ago

I've been waiting for a while for the tech to catch up, but it should be more or less possible now to use Whisper and an LLM to run a virtual assistant locally. Virtual assistants always seemed like a privacy nightmare to me so I never pulled the trigger. But if it's all local? It would be a great product. No internet unless I turn on a physical switch, no ads, no monthly fee. Just do the thing I want you to do. Maybe at the moment it will still need to talk to my GPU. But we're getting there.

vineyardmike 3y ago
Unfortunately you’d probably want a subscription to newer models that are trained on more relevant and new data. Basically the difference between a standalone GPS unit and an internet connected maps app - at first it doesn’t seem like you need anything new but slowly the world around it changes. But yea this seems like a great vision generally. I think that we’ll progress past a chat LLM to one that autogenerates UIs - several companies have already demoed this.
everforward 3y ago
You can duct tape together Whisper and GPT4All in a couple dozen lines of Python. It wasn't bad; I'm on a 3070 so it was slow, but tolerable (a couple seconds of latency up to 5 or so seconds for the full Whisper+Mistral7B pipeline). I named mine Jeeves, so at any point I could just "Ask Jeeves" (lol) and it would talk back to me. The TTS spoke slower than I would prefer, but I probably could have fixed it. I also should have prepended the prompt with something to encourage it to be brief. It often started reading out a couple of paragraphs of text.

captainmuon 3y ago

Seeing the fast development of AI in the last couple of years, it's incredible how stuck AI assistants are. Basic things like "Hey Google, turn up the volume" don't work. Just imagine what a good AI assistant could do with todays LLM tech. Actual things I would have used in the last two days: - Hey Google, what's the song that goes "da da da da da daaa da"? There are skeletons and elephants in the video? - Hey Siri, can you move all the windows of project XY to a fresh desktop? - Move all the shopping tabs to a new window. - Find the last contract draft for customer ABC.

troupo 3y ago
Many of those have nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with access points and integrations in applications and OS. But for everything else they do suck.
- aurareturn 3y ago
  Giving AI access to OS APIs is trivial for Apple and Google. The problem has been that AI assistant were always too dumb to understand user requests. LLMs changed everything.
  - troupo 3y ago
    First, it's not as trivial to give access to OS APIs as you think. Second, giving access to APIs... gives you access to APIs, and that's it. Even the most advanced LLMs are dumb as shit when it comes to anything non-trivial in programming. What makes you think that a modern LLM will manage to translate "move tab X to a different window" into a dozen or more API calls with proper structures filled in, and in the correct order?
    - aurareturn 3y ago
      It's trivial. For example, most macOS apps can already get these permissions. Apple can grant special permissions for Siri quite easily. I don't sense that GPT4 is "dumb as shit". I sense that it's extremely capable and very close to changing everything if, for example, macOS completely integrates GPT4.

skeledrew 3y ago

Contrary to the article, I'd say Amazon does have some incentive, and definitely the money to keep this going as long as they want. What's missing is mindshare, because voice assistants are fundamentally uninteresting beyond queries and basic automation.

pinkmuffinere 3y ago

>"Dozens" may sound like a dig at Alexa's ecosystem, but it's an estimation based on a podcast from Skills developers Mark Tucker and Allen Firstenberg, who, in a recent podcast, agreed that "dozens" of third-party devs were contemplating if it's still worthwhile to develop Alexa skills. The casual summary wasn't stated as a hard fact or confirmed by Amazon but, rather, seemed like a rough and quick estimation based on the developers' familiarity with the Skills community. But with such minimal interest and money associated with Skills, dozens isn't an implausible figure either. lol ya, I thought the title was a joke, but apparently their best guess is that there were dozens of developers. This is like a punchline from XKCD.

whoitwas 3y ago

I've never seen any value for me in the Amazon spy devices. They listen to your home and play ads. Amazon profits, not me. For me, device has less utility than an electric can opener.

nailer 3y ago

> The news has left dozens of Alexa Skills developers wondering if they have a future with Alexa, especially as Amazon preps a generative AI It's here now, they just haven't announced it. The Alexa devices at my home can answer arbitrary questions. "What is the round shape on top of the world trade center?" "That is the one world observatory" etc. There's a weird thing where some questions get picked up by the non-LLM. "how much will it rain today?" gets answered by the old weather app with a nonsensical answer like "it will rain today at 4PM"

drpossum 3y ago

I used it for grocery lists until a few months ago when they a) started putting ads in for when I was shopping b) discontinued the web interface which was far more convenient for me. I literally went back to pen and paper because of this endless closing off and injecting ads garbage.

nickburns 3y ago
i know, i know, M$!!1!111!!!! but check out To Do for this and other list making purposes. shared, synced family grocery list is a must in our household now. yes, items must be added 'manually.' but they can simply be checked/unchecked rather than deleting (which also provides a convenient pantry inventory review just before shopping trips).
- angra_mainyu 3y ago
  Is this satire?
  - nickburns 3y ago
    no, it's actually a suggestion for adults that grocery shop for themselves and their families.
_xerces_ 3y ago
That was the killer feature for me. Being able to yell "Alexa, put milk on the list" right as I poured out the last drop was very convenient. For larger lists like recipe ingredients I used the web interface. I still use it via the Windows app (which insists on grouping my items even though I keep turning it off) and my phone, but the experience and interface has gotten worse over time. I wonder if I can get similar functionality from Google.
- julianz 3y ago
  You definitely can get Google to mark one of your Keep notes as the designated "shopping list" and then add items at the top of it when you ask it to, it works pretty well.

wkat4242 3y ago

Makes sense. I'm sure they're working on a next gen Alexa based on LLM.

ralphc 3y ago

I wrote Alexa skills for personal, household use, but it was hard to find use cases that audio was faster than scanning a list of things like others had mentioned. My wife and I are NASCAR fans so I did have a skill where you could just ask "what's the weather at the track" and, based on today's date it would know where the next race was and give back weather for that location. But beyond the things mentioned here, other places have scaled back their free APIs for things like weather and other useful services. What really killed the interest was the nagging feeling that we had that Alexa was listening more than it should, so we keep it off most of the time so you have to go to it, have it listen, ask your question then turn listening back off.

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