29 ms·

Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

• Theodores 2y ago
  One problem with Alexa and all other voice assistants is that the older people that have money are precisely the people that detest voice assistants. So how do you make money?
  • devilbunny 2y ago
    Older people are not the ones who detest voice assistants (my in-laws love them). It’s the middle-aged (me) who grew up using computers and don’t trust something that’s always listening.
    • Theodores 2y ago
      [flagged]
• mPReDiToR 2y ago
  I'm never paying for Alexa. They get latinum enough from datamining and privacy intrusions. As soon as they put adverts on, or charge for the smart timer/lightswitch functionality, I'm out. There are OSS projects and I have RasPi devices sitting around. Burn an SD, plug a mic in, off we go. Alexa found its way into homes because it was free and does what people want. Don't screw that up, add value. Make people want to give you money. Don't tighten your grip or star systems will slip through your fingers. What do I know though, I'm only a guy who has one or more of these things in every room of my house. SMH.
  • corint 2y ago
    I still believe that device manufacturers should be forced to reveal any keys / similar to load 3rd party firmware onto devices like this, if/when the devices go out of support or deviate in pricing from when sold (viz: Ring Doorbells adding subscriptions). Sure, the vendor lock does allow them to sell the device at a lower cost, but you pay for it later.
  • infinityplus1 2y ago
    I would pay for a Jarvis style holographic AI, even if not fully AGI.
    • wdh505 2y ago
      I saw some waifu tech that is currently available in Japan that should be able to have the holographic part and a port for current ai https://blog.dejapan.com/2018/08/life-in-japan/gatebox-ai-virtual-waifu-home-assistant-robot/ https://blog.dejapan.com/2018/08/life-in-japan/gatebox-ai-vi...
• smarm52 2y ago
  https://archive.ph/5VPB5 https://archive.ph/5VPB5
• nope1000 2y ago
  > More than half of customers who buy smart-camera doorbells from Ring, another profitable Amazon device that the company bought in 2018, purchase security subscriptions. Security... Subscriptions?
  • ygjb 2y ago
    Yes, most consumer home security products have a security subscription attached because they require monitoring (and many jurisdictions require monitoring for alarm permits to help reduce false alarms). For Ring, that also means the features listed on their product page (cloud video access and history, etc).
  • cut3 2y ago
    Probably paying for the ability to save video recordings in the cloud, as opposed to paying them monthly to ensure they dont send goons to break into your house.
  • thebruce87m 2y ago
    Cloud storage. Downside is that only clips with detections are uploaded (plus a capture every n seconds). Alternative is something like ubiquiti that stores locally, so you get 24/7 recordings but it can be stolen or destroyed.
    • taskforcegemini 2y ago
      it is one alternative, there is plenty others. I'd suggest local storage with onlinebackup of any alerts (timeframes in which an alert occured)
• mgdev 2y ago
  This is the cost of building a proprietary distribution network. Now they need to monetize it.
• stacktrust 2y ago
  > The report also highlighted the dire need for this [AI] version of Alexa to make money to keep the voice assistant alive. The early iPhone left doors open for experiments that could later be supported and productized. Alexa failed to open up devices for experiments that could seed innovation. Look at the failure of the official "Skills" program, compared to the thriving HomeAssistant ecosystem that is an obvious match for smart speakers. If the device fails, 500K devices should be unlocked for use with generic Linux, instead of being relegated to landfill.
  • Bluestein 2y ago
    Alexa gone Lisa ...
  • StressedDev 2y ago
    I think Amazon actually sold 500 million Alexa devices, not 500 hundred thousand.
    • Log_out_ 2y ago
      The very next in doorstopping brick technology
    • saulpw 2y ago
      It was the second sentence in the article: "Amazon claims it has sold more than 500,000". 500m units in 4 years would have been an unqualified success. I don't even think the iPhone sold 500m in its first 4 years.
      • ssl-3 2y ago
        The article appears to be simply wrong. In May of 2023, Amazon reported that over 500,000,000 Alexa-enabled devices had been sold: https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/5/amazon-introduces-four-all-new-echo-devices-sales-of-alexa-enabled-devices-surpass-half-a-billion https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/5/amazon-introduces-four-... Now, of course: "Alexa Enabled" includes many things other than Amazon's own line of Echo smart speakers. But at least one source suggests that Echo devices sold 0.88mm units the first year alone (2014), with tens-of-millions sold each year in more recent times: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/amazon-statistics/#AmazonEchoSales https://www.businessofapps.com/data/amazon-statistics/#Amazo...
• skhunted 2y ago
  Alexa can add things to your shopping list but not take them off. You have to manually delete items in your shopping cart. This exemplifies why Alexa was never going to be successful. It is a user hostile experience.
  • loa_in_ 2y ago
    I can see why it was the case from engineering standpoint: adding a name from spoken phrase to a list is trivial, but looking up an item (that might not even be there) from a list based on a spoken phrase is prone to transcription errors. The user might refer to it with different phrasing than when it was added too. This is feasible only very recently with LLMs.
    • brianwawok 2y ago
      That’s a terrible argument. You found the item to add it. Just search a list 1/100000000 as big to find the item to remove. I can do with this Python and text to speech with no AI.
    • skhunted 2y ago
      I don’t see why one direction is harder than the other. The only thing that makes sense to me is that Amazon is user hostile and tries to dupe people into buying stuff even if they don’t want it.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • josefritzishere 2y ago
        Amazon is pretty generally user hostile. We see it in their corporte behavior too. I think for that reason culturally they'd struggle to design a device users want to interact with.
        • davidthewatson 2y ago
• StressedDev 2y ago
  The basic problem is Alex never had a business plan, which means Amazon never figured out how to build a profitable (sustainable) business. It also looks like Alexa's leadership gamed internal metrics to make Alexa look far more successful than it really was. I think this is what we can learn from Alexa: 1) Do not assume you can build a business, and then make it profitable. You always need to understand how a business can become profitable. Also, avoid fuzzy ideas, and metrics. For example, claiming unprofitable product X, is a success because it helps a company's brand, or causes people to buy more of product Y unless you have very very very strong evidence to back up these claims. 2) Dishonesty and bullshit do not work - Leaders, and teams need to be honest with themselves and with senior leadership. Do not use metrics to mislead other people, and point out flaws and limitations in metrics. Also, misleading people in general is not a good idea, and it harms organizations. 3) While killing products prematurely is a bad idea (see Google), continuing to support failing products for decades is probably not a good idea either. I wish the Alexa team luck. I hope they can figure out how to create a profitable business which delights customers.
• msoad 2y ago
  > The technology isn’t there, but they have a deadline The technology is there, as demonstrated by OpenAI's ChatGPT Voice Mode. With the resources and talent that Amazon possesses, they should at least be able to demo something similar. It's just that the Alexa organization is a mess, which prevents it from happening.
  • shell_game 2y ago
    Does Amazon actually have talent and resources though?
    • ysacfanboi 2y ago
      Not any more. Majority of talent got fired. Whoever is hired now will be gone in a couple years (says the internal tracking software that tells you how "new" you are across all of Amazon). That kind of churn ensures no real progress can be made. Just throw Alexa away already. It's a wrap.
      • Nimitz14 2y ago
        The actually good people left long before anyone got fired.
  • nine_zeros 2y ago
    Amazon doesn't have the talent. They do have many layers of metrics-massaging incompetent management that spends time attacking the people who do the real work.
    • Log_out_ 2y ago
      Metric hacking is still hacking, just not machines but processes. Mbas are golemn hackers,real recognizes real.
  • tomjen3 2y ago
    I don't think they can. One of the things that will define the AI era is that the cost of computation for one user drastically outweights what you could normally make in ad revenue. Thats why I have to pay more for Chat-GPT than I do for Netflix. What do you think adoption would look like Alexa costs 20 a month on top of the hardware? Because that may be approximately what it would cost for Amazon to be able to run an AI to power Alexa. Apple is the only one that is partially immune to this, because they can run the software on your phone, at least some of the time.
• InfiniteRand 2y ago
  I definitely think Amazon music’s growth is completely Alexa driven but not sure how much revenue that makes
  • ysacfanboi 2y ago
    You'd be incorrect. Amazon Music is not as valuable as people think, compounded by the fact that it helps foot the bill for Alexa. It's only right though, seeing as Music helped completely break Alexa internally. Repeatedly.
    • baq 2y ago
      I only have Amazon Music because I’ve got some Alexa speakers, so not sure which way the causation is presented, but end result is I am Amazon’s MRR, however small that is. …that said, the Amazon Music app doesn’t have an option to cast to Alexa and that’s beyond dumb.
      • notinmykernel 2y ago
        Is Amazon Music, the app, the same thing as Amazon Music, the team? Probs not.
  • o_nate 2y ago
    That's definitely true in my case. The only reason I pay for Amazon music is so I can use it on Alexa.
  • fantasybuilder 2y ago
    Isn't Amazon Music included for free with Prime? It must be the biggest reason for its growth. I personally don't know anyone who pays for Amazon Music without Prime.
• listless 2y ago
  The entire business model was people being willing to buy things “site unseen”. This is not how people shop. Seeing is an important part of the experience. Also, these losses are staggering. And yet they are still selling these things. I just bought one for the kids dorm room.
  • Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 2y ago
    One other reason is that the quality of Amazon listings has really nosedived over the last decade. There are too many spammy merchants in the marketplace now. You cannot just trust the name or description - you need to look at the reviews (or other websites) these days before you feel confident about your purchase. It’s a classic case of mismatched incentives - the Retail org is just focused on increasing sellers and listings because they have reviews to bail them out, but Devices really need quality results which Retail is not motivated to provide. Their recent focus on mimicking Temu and Shein is only going to make things worse.
    • SoftTalker 2y ago
      The reviews can be bogus too. I've just stopped shopping on Amazon. Their business model isn't trustworthy.
    • burningChrome 2y ago
      >> One other reason is that the quality of Amazon listings has really nosedived over the last decade. I stopped using Amazon years ago when I had four purchases of completely different and random items all turned up to be counterfeit. One was a Microsoft ergonomic keyboard, the other was a pair of Lucky brand jeans, the other was a pair of Ski goggles and the last thing was a Topo Designs backpack. I've also noticed that when I came back looking for something simple like a charging block for a new phone, I had pages and pages of Chinese merchants who all had similar looking products but just different brand names stamped on them. But I agree with everything you're saying, its not just logging on, finding what you need and ordering something. It takes ungodly amounts of due diligence to make sure what you're buying is a) a legit product and b) its not some suspect seller that's paying people to write fake reviews.
• pjmlp 2y ago
  All these voice assistants are gimmicks to me, they hardly provide any value, plus never get a proper Portuguese support.
  • genericacct 2y ago
    Can't entirely agree, alexa makes navigating smart TVs much easier for older folks
    • pjmlp 2y ago
      Doesn't help if language recognition is broken.
    • josefritzishere 2y ago
      older folks struggle with the set up so the efficacy is mixed.
    • _-_-__-_-_- 2y ago
      I managed to set one up for my in-laws. It works well enough with their smart tv (a plasma lg from 2010) that they can say “Alexa cable tv” or “Alexa Die Hard” and it will turn on the tv, find the streaming service that has the movie, and start playing. The voice incantation does have to be fairly specific and it did take some practice to figure it out.
  • hulitu 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • HDThoreaun 2y ago
    Voice controlled radio + timers is more than worth the cost of an Alexa device. Why does it have to be more than that?
    • pjmlp 2y ago
      If it doesn't speak my native language without gimmicks, it is trash. Additionally, I already have a radio and alarm clock.
• bentt 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• mitjam 2y ago
  Can I reflash an Alexa with an Open Source Firmware? Or is there another documented way to repurpose it? I‘ve tried to find something but was not successful. I Like the industrial design of the Alexa Show but not its Software/Service.
• nitwit005 2y ago
  > Amazon claims it has sold more than 500,000 Alexa devices I think they left a few zeroes off this one: 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...
• saberience 2y ago
  The strangest thing with Alexa is how it seems to have gotten worse and worse over time. That is, my Alexa right now has issues doing the most basic thing, it can't even play music right anymore. I remember when my friend in LA first showed me Alexa, playing music was all we used it for and it worked great for that. Somehow it's degraded over time and now it barely every picks the song or band I asked for. There was a time when I used Alexa for managing every light in my house, now I just gave up on everything except music, and I'm almost done with that part now too.
  • fhub 2y ago
    I've set a countdown timer and then asked it "how much time is left on the timer?" and it says "You have no timers set" then inside say 30s, the timer goes off. Has happened to me a half dozen times in the last 2 months (at different amounts of time left obviously). This was my primary use case of alexa and now I just use Siri on my phone when my phone is nearby. Siri isn't ideal as I find it hard sometimes to quickly see how much time is left on the timer. But at least it doesn't forget one is running.
    • traes 2y ago
      I'm pretty sure this occurs when the timer goes off during your query, and the alarm gets queued after the response. In my experience the alarm usually goes off immediately after, though, I've never experienced a 30s delay.
• arder 2y ago
  That "Downstream impact" metric sounds like a big yikes. Massive incentives to game that metric and before you know it you've got 10 projects all claiming credit for some theoretical downstream impact all of which are actually just canabalizing existing revenue. Like, Amazon is doing $5Bn of revenue selling tide pods, the Alexa team make some claim about people's likeliness to order tide pods via the Alexa and before you know it Amazon is still doing $5Bn of revenue selling tide pods but they've got a $2Bn cost centre of overpaid enginers designing hardware that lets you order tide pods. I wonder which way this splits for Amazon though, on the one hand lots of people already have Alexas and so you've got great brand recognition when you want to sell your Gen AI doodad. On the other hand, your Alexa brand is trash, everyone knows its basically only good for timers so maybe no one will take them seriously when the Gen AI version comes out.
  • klodolph 2y ago
    Tech companies have to cannibalize existing revenue to stay relevant long-term. If you don’t cannibalize your own revenue streams, then some other company will figure out how to take your revenue. (Innovator’s Dilemma takes this concept and stretches it out across a whole book.) That said… Alexa seems like such a waste. It’s like Sony making an MP3 player. Sony Electronics was never going to make a good MP3 player as long as Sony Records wanted copy protection. These are user-hostile decisions that protect the larger business. Likewise, can Amazon deliver an AI assistant that does something else, besides get people to buy more products through Amazon more easily? No, the incentives aren’t there.
    • adolph 2y ago
      I don’t Sony Electronics can blame the music side of the house for Memory Stick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Stick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Stick
      • klodolph 2y ago
        Sure, I agree that not 100% of all bad decisions ever made by Sony Electronics can be blamed on Sony Records. The number is not 0% either.
• pwthornton 2y ago
  I'd pay a monthly/yearly fee to be able to run Alexa's that can function as a smart home voice controller that does not try to sell me stuff.
  • bluGill 2y ago
    But of course there is no option for that as they think advertising is more valuable. Worse they have set the initial price as free and so now most people will object to paying despite how useful it is (I've seen some uses of Alexa that are probably not worth a monthly price, can they make money on $5/year for 10 devices?)
  • balls187 2y ago
    Not me. One: I don't want to pay a yearly fee to use a hardware device I paid for. Especially when that price will inevitably increase. Two: Paying a monthly fee for the privilege of saying "Turn the lights on." in my own flipping home. That is very hard pass. Three: Amazon already EOL's several smarthome products (CloudCam, Amazon Key come to mind). I'm glad that Amazon would take a huge L if they decide to abandon their Alexa ecosystem now.
  • 8organicbits 2y ago
    I find voice AI creepy as it's always listening. If you have to press a button to get it to start listening then you're better off typing your query. Plus I scan and read faster than an AI reads responses. I'd pay more for products that dont support it. (similar story for smart TVs).
  • bluSCALE4 2y ago
    I'm confused. This is already a thing via vendor, Hubitat or Home Assistant plugins.
  • sfblah 2y ago
    Right. Just charge a low fee, or attach it to Prime somehow. I'd pay for sure.
• orthecreedence 2y ago
  I still cannot believe Amazon convinced people to install 1984 surveillance in their homes, much less pay for it, for whatever trivial conveniences the stupid thing offers. It's not Amazon's fault but it's just strange to me how sideways our culture is that it's considered normal to let a corporation have unfettered access to your private space and pay them for being there. I get the tradeoff with smartphones...at least they have utility, and at least some weak guarantee of privacy (for whatever that's worth). What does Alexa really bring to the table? It can flip a light switch for me? I have a finger for that. It can tell me the weather? I can open the curtains and look outside. It can deliver counterfeit garbage to my house? No thanks. Who is enticed by this thing, and why?
  • tantalor 2y ago
    I'll explain in Steve Jobs language: A voice assistant, a home automation controller, and an internet-connected speaker. Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device!
  • throwawaysleep 2y ago
    > I have a finger for that. You have to get your finger to the switch. > It can tell me the weather? I can open the curtains and look outside. That doesn’t tell you the weather today, just the weather right now. > It can deliver counterfeit garbage to my house? No thanks. Garbage often is sufficient. I don’t need good quality goods in most cases.
  • nikolajan 2y ago
    What a weird take. What can a phone do for me, I can tap my finger a few times to send a message over telegram.
    • pessimizer 2y ago
      No you can't.
  • jklinger410 2y ago
    [flagged]
• 1970-01-01 2y ago
  Just an hour ago I asked Alexa "Is negative ten an even number?" and was shocked when it said "No, minus ten is a negative number and is not even" I asked again and the reply was exactly the same. Variations of the question still resulted in 'negative numbers cannot be even or odd' I checked again 20 minutes later and it then gave me correct answers to the exact same questions. I deeply want Alexa to fail as a product. It is constantly objectively wrong and should not be used for anything important.
  • spyspy 2y ago
    > It is constantly objectively wrong and should not be used for anything important. Welcome to AI. I got into an argument with a junior dev about some coding best practices the other day and came to find he was using chatgpt as a source for his argument. It’s terrifying anyone takes anything an AI says as truth. Now I’m afraid to even ask my google home simple math or kitchen measurement questions.
  • 1970-01-01 2y ago
    Update: I asked again if -1000 is even or odd, and Alexa continues to think negative numbers can never be even or odd.
• ergonaught 2y ago
  We have several Alexa devices. We use them all the time and for a wide variety of purposes. By any rational, actual customer-connected metric, they are a wild success in this and similar homes. This is an example of Amazon not actually letting the smartest people into the room. We do vast amounts of our shopping via Amazon, but that's through the app and website even when we manage the shopping lists/etc via Alexa. We're not going to do that directly through the robot. We're never going to do that directly through the robot. Anyone who proposed billions in R&D investments hanging on the delusion that we will do that through the robot, instead of paying attention to the things we are all actively actually doing every single day, should have already been moved along. We don't need to shop like that. We do need the hundred other things we do every day, and those are things Alexa currently does vastly better than the competition. The Prime stuff, the Kindle stuff, the dozen other Amazon-related things we do, are certainly further embedded into our lives by the fact of the Alexas. Their real problem is the sudden closing of the gap, which is nearly certain to occur in the next year or two. TLDR: "Amazon says you're using it wrong. Doesn't know how to count."
  • sillysaurusx 2y ago
    What do you use yours for? Mine’s little more than a fancy voice-activated light switch. Fully agree on the point about not shopping through Alexa. Basic questions are misinterpreted in sometimes hilarious ways.
    • djeastm 2y ago
      I have enough Echoes to cover my whole place within speaking distance and they serve as fancy voice-activated light switches and also timers, radios/music/podcast players (via Spotify) and calculators/measurement converters. They also provide local weather alerts and let me know when an Amazon package has arrived, both of which are nice. But whenever it tries to sell me anything, I get annoyed
      • sillysaurusx 2y ago
        Thanks for mentioning the Amazon package alert. I hadn’t set mine up.
• paxys 2y ago
  The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an afterthought. How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed? That demo definitely got applause from a boardroom full of execs. The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. This is also why Amazon's Dash buttons failed. I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy". Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my decision and suddenly order more things. If they want to salvage Alexa, they need to forget shopping and start doubling down on the smart home and assistant experience. The tech is still pretty much where it was in 2014. Alexa can set timers and tell me the weather, and...that's basically it. Make it a value add in my life and I wouldn't mind paying a subscription fee for it.
  • bluSCALE4 2y ago
    I don't think any of that is true. If Costco produced such features in their imaginary product, people may use it. Why? Because Costco has proven itself trustworthy of a blind repeat purchase. You could trust the price you're paying is typical and fair. Amazon on the other hand...
    • AlexandrB 2y ago
      Yes, Costco is like the opposite of the Amazon experience. Costco will only carry a few brands of any given item, but they're all generally pretty good with nothing drop-shipped from a random AliExpress vendor. Their house brand - Kirkland - is pretty good as well. It's a curated set of products with a relatively small number of SKUs vs. Amazon's flea-market-like experience.
      • 39896880 2y ago
        The Kirkland house brand is often backed by one of the name brands they sell. They have quality metrics for Kirkland and they check the products regularly. If the quality dips, they swap out the provider.
• aiauthoritydev 2y ago
  Products need to evolve with time. Gmail is not same as 0 years ago even though core functionality is email. Same for Google maps, Same for Amazon Prime etc. But Alexa has not really evolved.
  • jncfhnb 2y ago
    Gmail would be more or less just as successful if it were exactly the same as 10 years ago
• francisofascii 2y ago
  We pay $179 a year for Amazon music. We use Alexa all the time to play music. How is that not a huge revenue success? It sounds like they are not properly factoring that in as a downstream impact.
  • simonw 2y ago
    It takes a LOT of $179/year subscriptions to pay the salaries of 10,000 engineers. Especially since a lot of that subscription revenue for music will go to licensing the content.
    • dontlikeyoueith 2y ago
      That's not a revenue problem, that's an over-hiring useless employees problem.
      • Balgair 2y ago
        "All problems are people problems" -Gerald Wineberg
    • kevingadd 2y ago
      In general music is a business you go into if you want to lose money. At Amazon's size they can probably negotiate better deals than smaller companies can, but it's still a painful business to be in.
  • graton 2y ago
    For $168/year you could get YouTube Premium, which comes with YouTube music and ad-free YouTube (not counting ads inside the videos done by the content creator).
    • ghaff 2y ago
      Or as part of an Apple deal that comes with other stuff you may want. The music subscriptions are all pretty much the same unless you have very niche requirements.
• bluSCALE4 2y ago
  The problem with Alexa is that they overpriced it and pocketed the money instead of using the cost of the machine to build something that performed most of its commands on device. Instead, it's reliant on the cloud which is 100% a problem they created. That being said, their "losses" are all just tax write offs that they have to pay themselves, so Amazon doesn't lose a dime.
  • StressedDev 2y ago
    It's better to pay taxes on profits than to lose money and not pay takes. The reason is very simple. If you pay taxes, you keep the portion of money you made. If you lose the money, you have nothing. Note, I suspect that the Alexa business is worth nothing, and I bet the shareholders would rather have the money spent on Alexa instead of having the Alexa business.
• Eumenes 2y ago
  Imagine putting one of these in your home. Whenever I visit family/friends with one, I unplug it asap. 95% of people just use it to play a song or start a timer. Big waste.
• S0y 2y ago
  >Customers actually used Echo mostly for free apps such as setting alarms and checking the weather. “We worried we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer,” said a former senior employee. That's actually really funny to read. Just last night I was watching my brother cook and he asked Alexa to set a timer (It's pretty much the only thing he uses it for...) I jokingly said "You know, that's a really expensive timer."
  • philodelta 2y ago
    don't get me wrong, it is silly, but also being able to set a timer without touching anything with your gross cooking hands is unironically a wonderful feature.
    • sethhochberg 2y ago
      I like my Apple Watch for other reasons, but do have to admit that raising it to my face to set a timer or do a quick unit conversion while cooking is by far the most common "active" way I use it. I also use voice control a lot for music when I'm wearing gloves while working with greasy bicycle parts or when gardening. An entire product segment for when your hands are dirty...
      • emj 2y ago
        How does one need unit conversion while cooking? Sometimes I need how many grams is 1 dl of flour/oats (60g/35g) but I memorized that the second time, maybe if you are doing larger portions.
        • snapcaster 2y ago
          You answered your own question in the comment? If you require two instances to memorize it that means you needed unit conversion twice in cooking
          • crazygringo 2y ago
• alexathrowawa9 2y ago
  Throwaway here but I used to work in Alexa org at Amazon and was amazed by how big the org was (thousands and thousands of people) considering it doesn't seem to be a big revenue generator I remember constantly hearing about projects other teams were working on thinking "why would anyone use that" or "how would that ever make money" Just trying to shoehorn alexa into as many domains as possible It was like empire building at its finest I would joke that the canary tests were the biggest customer for a lot of services And the way amazon works with SOA even what seems like a small feature ends up being a couple services, a pizza team of 10 devs + SDM, the overhead is huge Back when it was announced alexa org was being hit harder by layoffs that did not surprise me
  • spike021 2y ago
    I once heard about a feature dogfooding invite that was sent out specifically for people with babies because they wanted to use Alexa always-listening to activate when a baby was crying and automatically order diapers or something ridiculous like that.
    • alexathrowawa9 2y ago
      I remember getting that invite! You could use "baby crying detected" as an automation trigger
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    • bagels 2y ago
      Doesn't even make sense. Babies cry all the time for a multitude of reasons, none of which are informed by how many diapers are in the house.
      • throwway120385 2y ago
        Yeah and given how often we get it wrong as parents, imagine the absolute dumpster fire it would be to have a voice assistant get it 10x as wrong.
• venkat223 2y ago
  They have data for AI skimming and training the ai agents. But with voice tracking issues inside homes may not yield structured data
• mgraupner 2y ago
  Speaking of Alexa: Can anyone explain the thought process behind making it possible to change the volume in small increments via buttons, but not via voice command (only in 10% increments)? I only use it as an internet radio player for background music and it's extremely annoying that it can't do that.
  • jjfoooo4 2y ago
    You can set the volume to any number from 1-10
    • mgraupner 2y ago
      Which correlates to 10% and 100%. I want for example 15%, which works with the buttons.
      • stronglikedan 2y ago
        If you say, "volume 15 percent" it will set it to 15%.
      • Manuel_D 2y ago
        I thought each button press on the volume buttons corresponded to + or -10%? I always thought Alexa's volume only had 10 states (11 counting zero) regardless of buttons or voice commands? Maybe it depends on the device, I have the spherical echo.
        • mgraupner 2y ago
          I checked and it's 3% increments via the buttons. I have 3 different Echos, they all behave the same.
  • jetrink 2y ago
    Can't you just ask it to set the volume to a specific volume as a percentage, like 38%? This works on Google Home. In the Google ecosystem, it also usually works if you ask it to raise the volume by a small increment like 5%. (Other times, this sets the volume to 5%.) I think you also used to be able to ask the device to raise the volume 'a bit' or 'a lot', for 5% or 20% respectively, but that stopped working a long time ago and I haven't tried recently. If neither of these work, then I am very frustrated on your behalf.
• superfrank 2y ago
  Years ago, my wife did some contracting work for a team responsible for the voice assistant at one of the major tech companies. Her role required her to work with the directors and VPs and she came home one day to tell me how one of them laid out their grand vision for the product and was talking about how, not only will people use these things to buy every day items, but one day people will be making major purchases like cars with these things. I can't speak for the Alexa team, but if the execs at Amazon are anywhere close to that delusional, it's no wonder these things are falling short of expectations. The problem IMO is trust. These devices get simple commands like, "turn off the lights" wrong on a semi-regular basis. No one is going to trust Alexa to buy the right thing until they're confident that it consistently understands them correctly and currently the error rate is just too high. Even if it does understand me, I don't trust Amazon to send me a quality product.
  • fantasybuilder 2y ago
    I think the issue of trust is a part of it, but not the most crippling when it comes to purchases. It's not that I don't trust Alexa is that I have no idea how to communicate what I need. There are thousands of options for any product - so which one should Alexa pick? How can I tell what sliced bread I want it to order without seeing the available options and prices?..
    • superfrank 2y ago
      That's fair. For me at least, I see those as two sides of the same coin. If I tell my wife, "buy me toilet paper", I trust that she knows enough about me to pick a quality product. I don't need to specify details because I trust her. If I tell Amazon, "buy me toilet paper", I wouldn't be at all surprised if I got some garbage product from a brand I've never heard of and like you said, it isn't clear what I could do to get Amazon to do something different.
  • matrix87 2y ago
    I think another problem is just a general lack of value. Why should the average person care about a 1% gain in convenience and adjust just to appease some C-suite delusion? It's like they all want to be Steve Jobs without offering any significant value to back it up
• anandlovelin 2y ago
  I was really pissed when Alexa tried to sell me "Despicable me" movie as the first thing when I announced good morning. Never tried that again.
  • Minor49er 2y ago
    What were you expecting it to do instead? Edit: Why the downvotes? This is a legitimate question
• tonymet 2y ago
  if they integrate LLMs and build true conversational capabilities they could charge a premium for therapeutic conversations
  • fantasybuilder 2y ago
    I love the idea but the only way I would ever use a product like that is if it's fully local and open source. No company is getting my "therapeutic conversations".
• atum47 2y ago
  I'm doing my part. Every time I search for a product I filter out Amazon from the results.
  • meroes 2y ago
    I’m doing mine by never having bought a voice assistant
    • amelius 2y ago
      Same here. I voted with my feet.
• rrwo 2y ago
  The last thing anyone wants a smart home assistant for is to purchase stuff. Controlling lights, heating and cooling, play music, find information, yes. But shopping is unexciting and low on the list.
• mensetmanusman 2y ago
  They should sell them all to openAI to become the voice interface of GPTx.
  • fantasybuilder 2y ago
    Amazon is surely working on an LLM competitor integrated into their ecosystem. Even using Llama 3.1 would suffice.
    • advisedwang 2y ago
      The article says as much: > A group was assembled ... to create a way to charge customers a fee for Alexa. Code-named “Banyan,” like the tree, the group has been working to create a product called “Remarkable Alexa,” that would be built on an entirely new technology stack and have more capabilities ... It will also incorporate generative artificial intelligence more than the current Echo experience. Bezos hinted at a new version of Alexa in a podcast interview in December. “Alexa is about to get a lot smarter,” he told the host.
• ddawson 2y ago
  https://www.wsj.com/tech/amazon-alexa-devices-echo-losses-strategy-25f2581a?st=refq2rgnoljinjo&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink https://www.wsj.com/tech/amazon-alexa-devices-echo-losses-st...
• farceSpherule 2y ago
  They made similar stupid decisions with the flood of their Amazon branded products that they were ripping off from Amazon sellers. The issue with Amazon is that they have so much money, they can afford to make dumb decisions.
• textlapse 2y ago
  If Amazon (and Google and Apple) couldn’t figure out how to monetize a voice/chat ‘app’ after a decade of plowing money into it, how does the whole LLM market come to fruition? Genuinely curious as I see a similar trend: there is definite consumer interest, but just like ‘kitchen timers on Alexa’ what if the LLMs main use case is simply to generate funny memes and the most basic RAG? How does this manifest into a trillion or gazillion dollar market? What am I missing? (I am discounting GH Copilot/Cody and the like as they are an extension of intellisense/ dev oriented workflows which really is a fantastic use case)
  • mvanbaak 2y ago
    hype, marketing, investors spent millions so lets make it happen. It feels a lot like the whole crypto thing
    • monero-xmr 2y ago
      But bitcoin and ethereum are near all time highs, while Alexa is laying everyone off and AI has no paying customers…
    • LordKeren 2y ago
      This is by design— the rhetoric around crypto was specifically tailored to emulate all the new-exciting-tech talking points in an attempt to get new people to buy in to the market and prop up the next rug pull. Every new culturally significant tech is going to sound like crypto from now on. And ultimately I think it is too easy to cynically look at all tech hype through the lens of crypto. I think it is pretty fair to say that LLMs have already achieved several magnitudes more real use cases than crypto ever did.
      • matrix87 2y ago
        > I think it is pretty fair to say that LLMs have already achieved several magnitudes more real use cases than crypto ever did. If you include black market economic activity, then crypto has done way more and over a much longer period
• southwesterly 2y ago
  Product looking for a service.
• browningstreet 2y ago
  I use mine to start music. I have different commands for music when I work, when I cook, when I’m getting ready for a run. About 4-5 commands in total. Sometimes I have to change the “whole house” Command because it doesn’t like where the word ‘group’ was. Sometimes it wants it first, other times.. after. I use commands like “music time”. I have for years. And sometimes it won’t understand my command request. I have to say it 5 times and then it works. I’ve looked for words it’s likely to understand better than others. I also have “sleep time”. Usually, when I’ve said it enough times for Alexa to understand, I’m no longer calm enough for sleep. I also can’t believe you can ask it to start an album and go to the second song. Seems like a basic request.
• ysacfanboi 2y ago
  Please realize, for this to be true, there must be another incentive. I.e., Alexa devices are government-subsidized spyware. What are the advantages for Amazon? - Mic-popping, Camera-popping, mobile phone backdoor access, network sniffing, device activity monitoring across all wifi/bluetooth connected networks. - Sidewalk (remember this? Amazon "borrows" your wifi, for free...) Unplug Alexa devices. Remove the Alexa app from your phone, and factory reset. Otherwise you remain complicit in Amazon surveillance of you and everyone that interacts with you.
  • 6ak74rfy 2y ago
    Sure. What do I do with all my devices that don't turn them into e-waste? I've looked for projects but haven't found anything yet.
  • advisedwang 2y ago
    I'm not saying that smart home stuff isn't amazing for the surveillance state... but I am quite happy to believe a company just made a strategy mistake, no behind-the-scenes government deals needed. We've seen companies build expensive products without monetization plans, especially when they are worried about getting cut-out by a compentitor many times.
    • ysacfanboi 2y ago
      If that makes it more palatable for you, then I understand why you need to prioritize this level of reasoning. Amazon culture is fail fast. Not many products at Amazon last this long, boasting multi-billion dollar losses YoY. Name another product at Amazon that does this, for this long.
  • bryananderson 2y ago
    This is hysterical. I never owned one until I worked on the product because I worried it was always recording/transmitting. Turns out it’s not. Promise. You don’t need a shadowy government cabal to explain Alexa persisting too long in the strategy described in the article. Just a powerful chief executive with an attachment to the product, the sunk cost fallacy, a company with too much revenue to know what to do with, some gameable downstream impact metrics, the inertia of large institutions, and empire building. It still could’ve become an incredible product if they’d gotten on the LLM chat/agent train early enough, but alas. I mostly use mine to set timers when my hands are full in the kitchen.
• bonestamp2 2y ago
  My kids use Alexa for listening to (spotify) music more than anything else. If Alexa could convince my kids that Amazon music is better than Spotify, then I'd pay for amazon music instead of spotify. So far, there hasn't been any serious attempt at getting us to embrace amazon music. If I was amazon, it would look like this. "Oh hey, you want to play Taylor Swift? Well, it looks like your brother is playing spotify on a different Alexa device. Would you like to play Taylor Swift using Amazon Music?" No ads. No bullshit. For 1 month. After that month, then it would say "It looks like your Brother is playing music on a different Alexa device. Sign up for Amazon music to play up to 5 different streams on alexa and elsewhere." (something that is possible, but more challenging to do with spotify on alexa devices).
• light_hue_1 2y ago
  The Alexa leadership at Amazon has been a waste since day 1 (pun intended). Shopping with Alexa is easy to fix! Reorder what I want, not the most popular item. When I say, order diapers, use the last brand and size that I ordered. That would actually be useful! Who wants to say "get my diapers" and get a random box of random sized diapers? Do the Alexa leadership even use their own product? Distinguish regular orders from one-offs. I never want a one-off order from a category I don't regularly order from. But I very much want to be able to reup regular orders. Let me order incrementally from Fresh as I cook. I would order from Fresh more often if I could just say "Alexa, we're out of red wine vinegar". Again, I have to know 100% that it would get the item that I want, not some random item. Then, let me say, "Ok, pull the trigger on all of the pending fresh orders Sat at noon". Voice identification is a must. I don't want random people ordering. And I don't want my kids ordering. The first thing everyone with kids does is turn off ordering. The fact that they can't sort this out is crazy! Their half-hearted attempt to create an ecosystem was completely wasted. No one wants to use a wake word, then another command word, and another word, just to access a skill. They need to figure out how to route to skills automatically based on what someone is asking. This isn't rocket science they're just incompetent. Also, has anyone seen the website to install new skills? It could win an award for worst UI. Skills can also charge you while using them! The skills store is full of 1 star reviews from people saying they got charged against their will for months in some cases. It feels like the Alexa team just doesn't talk to consumers.
• babypuncher 2y ago
  I unplugged my Echo years ago. I was getting 0 value out of it. Talking to your computer is an amusing novelty, for a while. But at the end of the day I prefer forms and buttons. I can open the Wikipedia app on my phone and type "Llama" just as fast as I can say "Hey Siri", wait for the beep, "tell me about Llamas", all without disrupting anyone else around me. Plus, I get the full Wikipedia article and not just a summary.
• alexa_throwaway 2y ago
  Throwaway here. I'm the CEO of a fast-growing AI startup. Alex asked to meet with us about a year ago (when we were about 1/10th the size), and after asking us to prepare lots of materials, they indicated they wanted to buy us or invest in us. People warned us not to talk to them because they have a reputation for gathering technical detail, and then trying to copy it rather than striking a deal. Our software could have radically accelerated and improved the Alexa experience basically overnight. At one point in the meeting, the head of Alexa's M&A/investment team said "tell us how much you think you're worth." I threw out a number, and he laughed and left the room. Today we're valued at more than that number and Alexa's core experience hasn't changed in the past year. They haven't been able to copy us. The Alexa leadership team has some hubris IMO.
  • enlyth 2y ago
    > Our software could have radically accelerated and improved the Alexa experience basically overnight By improve the Alexa experience, do you mean make it more useful for users or help it shift more chineseware for Amazon? Because as a user, I will never order anything without seeing a picture and reading reviews, voice shopping is dead on arrival If it's the former, I imagine it's Alexa hooked up to some gimmicky LLM, and I don't see where the actual profit comes from, I would have laughed and left the room too
    • alexa_throwaway 2y ago
      It's not Alexa hooked up to some gimmicky LLM. I don't want to give away too many details given that this is a throwaway account, but the way Alexa's ecosystem works is they have "skills" Alexa users can instantiate. Our API would have increased the utility (and therefore usage) of some of the top skills by quite a lot. I think of the Alexa team the same way I think of juiced up bodybuilders who think they can beat up anyone even though they've never trained MMA. The Alexa team looks in the mirror and sees big muscles, but they don't know how to use those muscles to fight. Yes, the strength and muscle helps, but ultimately to do well at MMA you have to develop specific skills, and you need to start with humility. Anyway, the past is the past. It sounds like Jassy is focused on turning around this division, which is a good thing IMO.
• stacktrust 2y ago
  Practical Alexa use cases for elderly: 1. Schedule/ask cooker to start, then stop after fixed time. 2. Blind person can control microwave with voice. 3. Blind person navigation via prompts from multiple Echo devices. 4. Blind person notification when doors opened or motion detected. 5. Blind person item locator, via Tile + Alexa. 6. On-demand instructions for caregivers. 7. On-demand physiotherapy exercise instructions. 8. On-demand streaming radio and podcasts. 9. TV voice control via Logitech Harmony or Android Fire TV. 10. Call PSTN phones via VOIP (10 number limit). 11. Zigbee devices with USA-based cloud security (Echo4 is a hub) 12. Arm/disarm Blink cameras. 13. AC/heat control via temperature sensor in Echo devices. 14. Announce notifications from Google Calendar. If Amazon would open up their devices and/or APIs, much much more is possible. There are some workarounds via HomeAssistant.
• ynac 2y ago
  I haven't used Amazon since about 2000 (kung fu movies for my brother-in-law). My current process for shopping online cascades from the actual manufacturer / source, eBay, specialized clearinghouse (e.g. www.Biblio.com for books) and as a last resort, Costco / WalMart - these last two often have hard to find items I need quickly (or so I think - I'm looking at you Black Cuman powder). All in all, I shop stress free in this decision tree. Oddly happy with eBay over the years. It may be because of their lack of new features and old UI that keeps things simple and quick / it just works. Yes, there are oddball things about each of these, but compared to AMZN...it's all bliss.
• 9cb14c1ec0 2y ago
  When you are worth trillions, what are a few billions if some C-suite occupant decides it doesn't matter.
• throwadobe 2y ago
  I think the fundamental issue with Alexa is that Amazon is trying to answer the question "how can we use it to sell more shit?" instead of trying to answer "how can we make people's lives better by adding more value than any other assistant in the marketplace?"
• zombiwoof 2y ago
  Siri: hold my beer
• Zenst 2y ago
  The amount of awareness and integration with its revenue streams makes it a loss leader. It equally helps tie people into that ecosystem. So it's an underrated appreciated marketing budget more than a loss. Now they can and should have added functionality(worthwhile pay for add ons) earlier and then, Alexa does have some basic flaws in dialogue, like try and ask it for the wind direction without being subjected to a weather forecast that tells you everything but the wind direction. Then the pet peeves for example - Ask for the time, you get the time, and you politely say thank you, to which Alexa responds "Anytime". But with the processing done at a backend, they do have an opportunity via ease of access and user-base to jump into the AI personal assistant race, if they price it right. Which is what seems afoot, though the price will be key here.
  • DaoVeles 2y ago
    Its like advertising. We know that half of it doesn't work, we just don't know which half. Alexa is one of those things that keeps Amazons presence in mind.
• jcpham2 2y ago
  Cancelled Amazon two years ago after they banned me because the Amazon credit card on file was expired and they continued billing it. Woke up to a house full of Alexa devices that couldn’t tell time. A banned account is the same as no internet access. Actually we overslept because none of the alarms worked. None of this really surprises me but Amazon’s walled garden has really went down in quality.
• osigurdson 2y ago
  People don't really want an always on, live mic reporting back to the mothership anymore - at least I don't.
  • Underphil 2y ago
    But they've sold millions so that sort of squashes that argument. (I'm with you though. It boggles my mind.)
    • osigurdson 2y ago
      Are they still selling however? It seems like everyone had a Google home or Alexa ~5 years ago (including myself) and now no one does.
• dietsprite 2y ago
  If Amazon wants to continue to recoup this investment from Alexa sales, Amazon needs totally different leadership on the Alexa team. Alexa's app and user experience are terrible. Adding a skill is a highly convoluted process. Most notably and most recently, the decision to drop access from 3rd party apps to its lists is an incredibly short-sighted idea. No one wants to use Amazon's software. Make Alexa effortless to use with 3rd party software. https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/31/24168681/amazon-alexa-third-party-shopping-list-integration-going-away https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/31/24168681/amazon-alexa-thi...
  • edgefield 2y ago
    The UI is hilariously bad. I’m playing a NY Times podcast and say “Alexa, pause.” Two minutes later, I say “Alexa, play” and it starts playing some random news clip from ABC News.
• aussieguy1234 2y ago
  With the latest open-webui, I have an always available voice mode assistant with a real LLM that is smarter than Alexa running locally. And I can be sure I'm not being spied upon.
• chamanbuga 2y ago
  IMO Alexa is just a bad product, which Amazon thought scale scale scale instead of finding value and product market fit. So many things that it does is better than predecessors, but overall is subpar and didn't get better over time. Ex. Music. Bread and butter for Alexa. Conversion opportunity to Amazon Music. Conversion opportunity for podcasts, news, so much... Try asking Alexa to play new music, something different, slow jazz, I didn't like that song, play something like blah, etc... Most of these queries do not work. It's such a POS. Ex. Proactive notifications. Alexa routinely informs me that diapers or something else from my routine purchases is likely running out and I should refill them. I've used this feature 100s of times in the 7+ years I've owned Alexa. I'm sure the LTV I've given Amazon is hell a lot more than most Alexa users. That being said, I can get so many more recommendations than just the 1-2 things in my routine purchase history. I could go on and on. Ultimately, like many products by large companies, Amazon had a product that received early success because of novelties like hands-free music, alarms, timers - but never found more utility beyond that. Instead of doubling down on discovery, they worked on scaling out the platform and opening it up to 3P developers. The platform they exposed was limited in frustrating ways, and ultimately did not help them discover any hidden gem skills. IMO the smart home virtual assistant is ripe for easy disruption. Throw out Amazon's model and use ChatGPT / Anthropic instead. Keep the 3P plugins. This fusion would be a sufficiently better product than what's in the market today.
• midnitewarrior 2y ago
  Simple fix - First 2 years of Alexa are free, then you have two-tier pricing for prime / non-prime members for annual fee. In a few months, they can start getting revenue for any device that's been active more than 2 years. Best case scenario - it turns into a profit center. Worst case scenario, the platform is abandoned, and Amazon can stop bleeding.
• doubtfuluser 2y ago
  smart-home stuff was always a bit „off“ to me and. Why would I want to control light by voice? It’s much better to do this by motion detection. Same for shutters: time + light detection is much better than saying anything. I want the smart-home to automatically do stuff not just a different „switch“
• _xnmw 2y ago
  Sometimes I think about the billions of dollars invested in stupid marginal tech like voice assistants, or boilerplate spreadsheet replacement SaaS and wonder if capitalism has failed. Why is this money not being invested in something that is obviously more desperately needed, like building more housing? As this article pointed out, some of this stupid marginal tech like Alexa isn't even making a profit, Amazon is *loosing* billions on it. Then why do this? We have real crises facing us, like climate change and the housing crisis and war, and meanwhile YC is funding "developer tooling". As if what society needs most right now is that developers with 6-figure salaries need to make their already cushy jobs slightly easier with some IDE widget.
• andrewstuart 2y ago
  What happened to all the stuff about relentless custom focus?
• bogota 2y ago
  I hope the product burns. For the simple fact that it was such a huge oversight to use a popular human name for a home assistant product. Really just such an extremely stupid thing to do.
  • pedrogpimenta 2y ago
    Your name is Alexa, isn't it?
    • bogota 2y ago
      It is not but i know two people who are named that. The jokes get old and it’s even worse when you have the stupid devices go off all the time when people use their names. One of them just switched to using their middle name because they got so sick of it.
• prmoustache 2y ago
  Do people use alexa for anything else but controlling audio? That is the only usage I have witnessed in housholds that had it.
  • jjeaff 2y ago
    also good for setting multiple cooking timers.
• rob74 2y ago
  Amazon is not losing billions, Amazon is still wildly profitable! And the "loss leader" devices like Kindle, Alexa etc. helped to get it where it is now, even if the devices themselves generate losses. I think this new strategy is more "now that we are the undisputed online shopping monopolist, do we still need these loss leaders, or can we eliminate them in order to be even more profitable?"
• mattr88 2y ago
  Amazon must create a need in the marketplace for people to want to use and buy these products in order to be profitable. Like Apple with Apple watch or Airpods.
• dwighttk 2y ago
  Lose a bit on each unit but make it up in volume
• HTG43 2y ago
  Won one at a work raffle. Only reason I have one. Good for timers, weather checking, Amazon notifications like package deliveries, and some quiz games are decently engaging while you wait for food to sauté.
• honkycat 2y ago
  A former company I worked at made a TON of money by providing radio over the internet, and Alexa was one of our big money makers. We had a partnership with Amazon to be THE radio provider. ...Then Amazon released their own internal version of our product and kicked us off of keywords. Our revenue tanked due to this, and I ended up getting laid off. Because Amazon saw an opportunity and betrayed their partner. Get bent amazon! Why would anyone ever integrate with Alexa if they are just going to steal the idea?
• dboreham 2y ago
  MBAs eating the world again...
• fredgrott 2y ago
  same mistake as HP with cooltown push something to sell hardware without adequate consumer research to back it up. I use to get requests to interview with Amazon monthly until the hardware head got let go....it was somewhat comical....
• DragonStrength 2y ago
  > Amazon’s devices operation was a pet project of Bezos And he saw it as his way to be Steve Jobs instead of Sam Walton. Bezos got bored with it when it was clear it wasn't working and left the hard work of cleaning up his mess to his successor. It seems clearer than ever that the low interest rates and creative accounting which let Amazon grow like this is not something to admire.
• bentt 2y ago
  My kids have grown up with Alexa devices. They use them as speakers, to listen to Audible, and as ways to communicate with us. I've been under the belief that the devices do not spy on us, based on a few test articles I read. If I ever heard that that was not the case I'd jettison them all from the house.
  • Ylpertnodi 2y ago
    You're very trusting. I won't let alexa in my home, let alone near my kids. How do you trust something that you can't know what is being done (ie recorded for later, later use - see the github nodelete stories) with it?
    • nelsondev 2y ago
      Yet in your house you likely have a mobile phone, a computer, perhaps a Smart TV; all with microphones and a long history of privacy breaching hacks.
    • bentt 2y ago
      I'm not that trusting. I just think that if it came out that Alexa devices were recording outside of their wake word then it would do tremendous damage to the brand and they'd not want to risk it. I feel like the incentives are aligned in this case. I don't consider data collection and targeting from data collected during the wake word to be spying.
  • itscrush 2y ago
    I think it's a subjective call on what you consider spying. Amazon and its integrations / 3rd parties are certainly using what they can gather based on Alexa interactions to better sell and serve their ad ecosystem at minimum right? And I've never seen someone leave theirs muted/red in practice. https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10920 https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10920 among others are certainly available in this question space to help navigate your own tolerances.
• dylanwenzlau 2y ago
  I'd love to have spent more on Alexa, but having trust in the quality and pricing was critical to me so I stopped ordering after they messed it up a few times. I now verify my purchases on the website to ensure the bulk facial tissues (or whatever) are actually the cheapest and most legitimate listing for the brand I want. Our company was acquired by Amazon in 2017 to help power Alexa's general knowledge / informational answers, and that's pretty much what we did. I only stayed for 15 months after acquisition though.
• commercialnix 2y ago
  Imagine being dumb enough to have one of those in your house.