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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 w

by 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.
    - rainbowzootsuit 2y ago
      This used to be the Sears Kenmore & Craftsman model where appliances were really Whirlpool, or Maytag, Carrier{1}. Hand tools variously came from many OEMs like SK, Plumb, Knipex, and Williams{2}. I suppose they still do, now at Lowes, but the OEM is Chinese. {1}https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/How_to_identify_who_made_your_Kenmore_appliance https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/How_to_identify_who_made_your_Ke... {2}https://forum.toolsinaction.com/topic/2118-craftsman-date-codesstampings/ https://forum.toolsinaction.com/topic/2118-craftsman-date-co...
      - dghlsakjg 2y ago
        The big thing with Sears Craftsman (formerly), and Costco (currently) is that the company will back the product. If I want to return a product to Costco, I have really strong confidence that they will take it back.
        throwadobe 2y ago
        TBF to Amazon they take all my shit back on the reg
        dghlsakjg 2y ago
        Amazon will accept returns, but not like Costco will or sears did. Sears would exchange any broken craftsman tool for a new one even decades after purchase. Costco is much the same. Used, year old stuff with missing parts will gladly be refunded in full.
        bombcar 2y ago
        To be fair to Costco you have to understand that the way they do that is they just send the item back to the vendor and deduct it from the next purchase. The vendors only option is to not sell stuff to Costco anymore.
        2y ago
  - swozey 2y ago
    Costco really needs to get new products in or I don't think it will do well with genz and younger millennials. I hadn't been to a Costco since I was a kid so I had completely forgotten that the only stock (maybe) a few versions of specific items. I went a year or two ago thinking I'd come home with months worth of groceries and I was shocked that it STILL looked like the inside of a 1990s fridge and cabinet with such incredibly healthy options as (only) Sunny Delite and Tropicana for orange juice, massive boxes of Lays chips and cheezits and popcorn. I saw so few items that weren't basically boxes of corn syrup and sugar in some form. There's so many healthier snacks nowadays. I didn't expect a complete grocery experience but I was expecting it to have far more healthy options these days, or even just more options in general. I don't eat any of this stuff. I guess you're a costco family or not. I was a costco family as a kid and had to learn how to eat healthy after shoving soda down all day long my entire childhood. edit: Yeah I'm looking just at their juice section here and there's not a single less-sugar option just as an example https://www.costco.com/juice.html https://www.costco.com/juice.html. Although, damn, $18.99 for 24 ojs is good. But both options are so disgustingly sweet. I had a single OJ for $7 from einsteins yesterday. edit: Go down the orange juice flavor pack "Why do they all taste different" rabbit hole with me.... https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5mpdop/eli5_why_does_orange_juice_from_tropicana_taste/ https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5mpdop/e...
    - meroes 2y ago
      What’s healthier than being able to buy massive amounts of high quality fish and beef and decent quality vegetables and fruit, with zero extra ingredients? Same for legumes, farro, brown rice, etc. They have tons of zero sugar drinks as well. I can’t eat that healthy via other grocery stores because it’s too expensive typically.
    - NickC25 2y ago
      if you want healthier juice....buy a juicer and make it yourself. You're never going to get healthy options from a wholesaler who buys from massive brands that are not known for healthy options. Long term, making it yourself is cheaper too. Most of the time in the juice space, anything that is designed to be shelf-stable in a warehouse is not. at. all. healthy. It's packed with preservatives and other stabilizers that are not good for you to consume. Or it has been pasteurized, which kills the vast majority of the nutrients in the liquid itself. I will say as a caveat, that the Kirkland Signature Organic Coconut Water is quite good.
- noveltyaccount 2y ago
  To build on the Costco analogy: for any given product category they typically only have three specific options: good, better, best. I could tell Costco bot that I need AA batteries and it would ask me if I prefer Duracell, Kirkland brand, or cheapest. I trust that either of them will be plenty good, so I would say cheapest. Amazon has a vastly different experience with thousands of indistinguishable Chinese knockoffs. I can only ask Alexa for a very specific product, otherwise I don't trust what I'll get. I use Alexa to add products to my cart, which serves as a reminder that I need to do a little more shopping from my phone or PC.
  - jprete 2y ago
    To add to your point, one can't even pick out a brand-name product directly from Amazon's website and be sure of getting the real thing.
    - wnc3141 2y ago
      That's been an issue with ordering consumer electronics. I don't know if the item is refurbished, returned,or endorsed by the manufacturer warranty. I basically only order through the manufacturer or best buy these days.
      - sambaumann 2y ago
        Even when amazon shows that you're on the manufacturer store, it still may not be genuine. I bought an intel wifi card off what looked like the official intel store on amazon, but it turns out that it was an out of production model sold by a third party, but amazon showed that it was "Intel". Very confusing and frustrating if you don't know what to look for beforehand.
      - dghlsakjg 2y ago
        Does Best Buy not resell returns?
        qingcharles 2y ago
- paxys 2y ago
  > If Costco produced such features in their imaginary product, people may use it. The question is would it make people shop more? If you buy one set of paper towels a week, and Costco rolls out a voice interface, would you now start ordering 2 or 3? If not, what return are they getting on the billions of dollars in additional spending? In reality people would use it for a day, go "neat", and switch right back to the website or app.
  - dontlikeyoueith 2y ago
    > The question is would it make people shop more? No, that's not the question. The question is would it make me shop more AT COSTCO. And yes, it would make me shift some of my purchasing from my local grocery store to Costco. Costco is a long drive that's only worth it for large trips. But if I could voice order for shipping or (even better) delivery? My local grocery with its god-awful parking lot full of blind 90-year-olds stuck in reverse would be in serious trouble.
    - paxys 2y ago
      Huh, we are not talking about building a delivery network here. The comparison is between ordering on a website/app and ordering on Alexa.
      - dontlikeyoueith 2y ago
        Do you think you go pick up your Alexa orders at the store?
- ashconnor 2y ago
  The prices for items in my Amazon cart change multiple times per day. Until they figure out price stability for staple goods then nobody will use this. Hell I don't even use Subscribe and Save for the same reason.
  - kyllo 2y ago
    This. I bought toothpaste on Amazon, used it up, and the next time I went to buy the exact same toothpaste, the price had doubled.
    - coliveira 2y ago
      Yes, they have a dark pattern where people buy a product and give good reviews, so suddenly they increase the price to benefit from that.
  - bluSCALE4 2y ago
    Same, that's really why it was my sticking point for the post when in reality, getting the wrong item is a bigger issue. Lots of times I'll order something on promo only to have it substituted in the near future for either an inferior product or near double the cost.
- Twirrim 2y ago
  This is the inherent problem with Amazon's support of 3rd party vendors through their platform, and the general lack of quality controls. I increasingly use specific companies for purchases, because I can't guarantee that what I order through Amazon will actually be the product I wanted, or be at the quality level I'd expect. It's getting to be absolutely awful.
  - rendang 2y ago
    This is interesting because you often hear Amazon treats its 3rd party sellers poorly - perhaps they are driving away the quality sellers?
  - CSMastermind 2y ago
    Yeah I've largely migrated my purchases off of Amazon for exactly this reason. Checking now, I placed 83 orders last year. I've placed 3 so far this year.
swatcoder 2y ago
> 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. This is compounded by the multi-headed monster that large orgs like theirs have no choice but to become. If customers could trust that every day essentials had a relatively stable price and availability pattern like they trust from their local grocery store (rightly or wrongly), blind ordering might be more tenable. But some other head on the beast wants to keep Amazon shaped like an unmonitored digital marketplace where orders are fulfilled dynamically by bidders and algorithms, so your Tide Pods could be anywhere from $6.99 to $64.99, and you might get anywhere between 10 and 100, and they might arrive tomorrow or next week, and they might come in retail packaging or as a bag of tide-pod-resembling-mystery-objects, etc. Of course blind ordering won't work when you can't give your customers any assurances (let alone guarantees) about price, quality, volume, etc
- droopyEyelids 2y ago
  This was exactly my problem with the dash buttons, and with Amazon's recurring order system. And I'm not certain, but I believe that sellers game this system- you can see certain things that make sense to order on a recurring schedule have unconscionable prices. Once you have a certain threshold of recurring orders, why not increase the price 10x? Especially because Amazon puts so many dark patterns in the way of a user canceling a "subscription".
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I just reordered something I order fairly frequently today. The price is pretty predictable but, yes, I like to just double-check it hasn't doubled in price. Not a big deal to order every few months and confirm it's still what I want to order at the right price as opposed to just putting it on an out of sight, out of mind subscription.
- chaostheory 2y ago
  Blind ordering only made sense when Amazon customer service was top notch. That ended when Amazon started having profitable quarters and started Day Two. Now I have to be paranoid about checking product details like if there are 3rd party sellers using FBA which potentially signals fakes. There’s no longer blind trust in Amazon for a lot of customers. I can’t just mindlessly buy stuff with the hope that Amazon customer service can take care of anything going wrong like they did years ago.
AlexandrB 2y ago
Some things Amazon did since the introduction of Alexa have definitely worked at cross purposes to a sightless buying experience as well. Maybe I would order a product sight unseen from 2014 era Amazon, but in the intervening time Amazon has been flooded by cheap knock offs including Amazon's own Amazon Basics. Amazon has also started placing promoted products higher in search results. As a result, even searching for a specific brand name doesn't yield the results you would expect.
YetAnotherNick 2y ago
I don't think they tried hard to create an experience user would like. Their shopping features is honestly very lacking. I think Alexa was just because of Amazon's norm of spending very high on R and D. That was the reason AWS was born. No one thought people would pay something like 10x just for consistency in cloud, but here we are. One AWS could cover 20 Alexas.
- castlecrasher2 2y ago
  I'm not sure there is a good means for buying over voice only, and I'd argue it's only possible to know now that users overwhelmingly prefer digitally handling the product (title, pictures, description, reviews) before making even repeat purchases. Similarly, I'm not sure Amazon could convert consumers to a tablet-based purchasing device like they envisioned Alexa; we all have smart phones and tablets already.
  - YetAnotherNick 2y ago
    e.g. I order a particular soap/shampoo or coffee beans every few months. If they had tried recognizing it, they could actually have improved the experience.
simonw 2y ago
> I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy". Especially given the bonfire of trust that is Amazon "sponsored results". Any time I search for anything on Amazon these days I have to spend a bunch of extra time scrolling around trying to figure which of the search results is genuinely a good deal as opposed to one that's paid for placement. Given that, why would I ever trust something like an Alexa to select a good deal for me?
- walthamstow 2y ago
  Ublock Origin disables all the sponsored stuff and shows your more organic search results. I only see sponsored when I use the Amazon app on my phone.
elpakal 2y ago
> Make it a value add in my life and I wouldn't mind paying a subscription fee for it. I dunno, I feel like the value was priced in the purchase price for me. I would not consider paying both a purchase price and subscription fee for it and probably not a subscription fee at all because all they ever do is go up. What would I do with this dumb robot in my house when I don't agree to pay for their latest fee structure.
- paxys 2y ago
  Well it's still a speaker, and will still play music. If they bundle in a GPT-5 level personal assistant I can definitely see a ton of people paying the added fee.
- gnfargbl 2y ago
  Exactly. In our household Alexa is used for playing Spotify, switching some lights on and off, and as an intercom. There is absolutely no chance that I am paying a subscription for a device that is pretty bad as an intercom, and only okay as a light controller/speaker. In fact, this quote from the article is a little concerning: > The new technology would more seamlessly allow users to control functions like smart home devices using their voices rather than opening an app. Problem is, the existing technology can already do this, most of the time. It sounds very much like Amazon is going to try and charge me a monthly fee for something I already have. That's not going to work out.
- gregmac 2y ago
  This is a problem in general with a whole bunch of products. If I'm paying up-front, the subscription needs to be an optional add-on that provides additional value. The thing should continue working at some base level for its working lifetime, even if I cancel or the service is shut down. If the "base level" on the thing I bought is ever changed after my purchase, the company has burned their trust with me. In fact I'll probably switch away and never buy anything from them again. On the other hand, if they want to build it so a subscription is required to work at all, then I don't want to buy the hardware that I clearly don't actually "own" anyway. It's fair to require paying up-front for a year or two (eg: cell plans) or have a contract requiring a minimum term because obviously the hardware costs something to produce, but in this type of business the product is really the subscription, and the device is just the means of delivery.
dawnerd 2y ago
It's also why subscribe and save ends up being me cancelling or skipping every month. The prices are not stable enough to blindly trust. One month its cheap, next month it'll be 300% increase.
robertlagrant 2y ago
It would be better if Alexa could have shopping lists. "Alexa how much is a box of tide pods? .... Okay, order me the large box with free shipping please." That would be pretty useful. And any subscription good you've already signed up for would be pretty helpful as it would be nice to manage them with a voice interface. But I don't know if it generates billions in revenue.
JoeAltmaier 2y ago
I run my fire tv with it. Context-free search - even if I'm in a video I can just ask "Alexa show me that new movie with Michael Baldwin" or whatever and it goes to the search screen with results. No fooling with a remote, at all. So for that I appreciate Alexa.
jeffh 2y ago
> If they want to salvage Alexa, they need to forget shopping and start doubling down on the smart home and assistant experience [...] and I wouldn't mind paying a subscription fee for it Why do you say that (both parts)? Alexa has done a good job to integrate with lots of other devices. I can control many aspects of my house through Alexa - lights, blinds, AC, sound, etc. I value that, but I don't think I value it enough to ever want to pay a subscription for it. That's as silly as whoever though selling heated seats in your BMW would fly. I made sure that in each home component I chose a solution that works locally (only AC I had to compromise for lack of options). And with all that value it provides as a hub? My alexa can't be used to buy anything, call anyone, etc. None of that is configured or permitted as much as I can shut it down. I don't personally see the value there. I for one am curious where Amazon chooses to draw the line. I don't want to pay a subscription to shout out local hub control commands, but they could be draconian to extra value.
hibikir 2y ago
I'd be happy ordering with a voice assistant if it's at least as good as I am at deciding good alternatives. Imagine I want to, say, purchase garbage bags, because I am out. It's not exactly a complicated product, and yet I might care about whether it has any smell reduction agents, whether the bag is tough enough, the size, and possible alternatives that are either a bit better, or quite a bit cheaper. Either the agent understands my preferences, or I am not going to trust it. And as we look at Amazon's webpage, we first have straight out ads, then a few items it hopes I might buy that are typically related to what other people buy, and maybe a mention of what I bought before, but no understanding of why I bought that one. It's not a very easy task, and one where it's easy to lose trust
- ghaff 2y ago
  On the other hand, I have--for better or worse--default brands for most of that stuff and I go to a Walmart every six months and load up my cart.
- playingalong 2y ago
  The system could simply default to whatever I picked the latest (or same brand).
ern 2y ago
I would consider using Alexa to buy things if it understood what I wanted. It rarely does. Asking it to list subscriptions, for example doesn’t work. Trying to get it to set up anything beyond a simple timer is a hit-and-miss affair.
ern 2y ago
I would consider using Alexa to buy things if it understood what I wanted. It rarely does. Asking it to list subscriptions, for example doesn’t work. Trying to get it to set up anything beyond a simple timer is a hit-and-miss affair. The fact that they could be finally fixing this, and then are putting it behind a paywall is ironic, because if it finally works properly, people could actually start using it for buying stuff.
JamesSwift 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. I disagree. The issue here is they had a really great use-case and utterly failed to deliver to the end user. No one is requesting their smart assistants to order anything because there is absolutely no support on the platforms + absolutely no user trust of how that is going to go. If all they ever did was niche their assistant down to being a smart shopping list, it would have been a great product, and likely would have driven sales. Instead they failed at even the thing they would have been had an advantage on (selling things to customers who are buying from them directly). Google and apple would have been operating through a black box of "privacy preserving apis" to do the same with their own integrations. Then they proceeded to suck at the stuff all the other assistants also suck at.
crorella 2y ago
This, plus the fact many of the products sold by Amazon now are fakes and low quality items. I almost never order from Amazon now and doing it blindly via Alexa is not an option.
mikehollinger 2y ago
>If they want to salvage Alexa, they need to forget shopping and start doubling down on the smart home and assistant experience. Agree. Go look at the Alexa Skills for any random category and sort by "best sellers," then sort again by "average review." There isn't an ecosystem. For Lifestyle, the "4th best selling" [1] skill is "North American Roofing," which is for a company in Tampa. There should be more there. Given the devices with a touch-sensitive screen, some form of presence detection, location awareness, and other things, there's a lot of missed potential there. [1] https://www.amazon.com/s?i=alexa-skills&bbn=13727922011&rh=n%3A13727921011%2Cn%3A14284837011&s=exact-aware-popularity-rank&dc&qid=1721854718&rnid=13727922011&ref=sr_st_exact-aware-popularity-rank&ds=v1%3ATmlYgPdQt8csGYqYXgCKxyu0sQnmSAnvPJpLUS4vLGQ https://www.amazon.com/s?i=alexa-skills&bbn=13727922011&rh=n...
- ghaff 2y ago
  I have basically zero interest in "smart home" features and I'm not sure what "assistant experience" means at the current level of technology. It certainly isn't an admin with a roughly middle of the pack level of savvy much less the actual exec admin that I would want.
deanCommie 2y ago
What do you need Alexa to do with your smart home that it can't do today? https://www.amazon.com/alexa-smart-home/b?ie=UTF8&node=21442899011 https://www.amazon.com/alexa-smart-home/b?ie=UTF8&node=21442... Seems like the voice-smart-home problem is the same as the voice-shopping problem: There is a limit to how many features you can/want to support in a voice interface.
- Domenic_S 2y ago
  It just sucks. I get non-deterministic reactions from "turn off the lights" vs "turn off every light" vs "all lights off".. one of those phrases eventually works. I had to set up a custom action ("goodnight") to reliably do the thing. If they focused on getting voice control for home automation perfect, it could be a real winner.
swozey 2y ago
With how much Amazon pricing fluctuates I definitely want to see the page before I buy. y protein powder that was, I think $50s pre-2020 is now $80ish. Sigh. Goodbye Hydrowhey, back to the chalky stuff.
Terretta 2y ago
> How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods"... The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. A bigger problem is their kids do.
smrtinsert 2y ago
I would not give Amazon control over my home. That's too far. I want a company that focuses on security.
- mymyairduster 2y ago
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pj_mukh 2y ago
What I want is a truly personal assistant (which LLM's should be capable of). Alexa can barely get me answers to google-able questions. If I could be assured of privacy issues, I'd be happy to give it access to my email, calendar, bank accounts etc. and then let me just use it like a Chief of Staff. I know another company is going to come do this, but it's crazy that that company may not be Alexa/Google.
- willsmith72 2y ago
  Why is that so simple? I've had online bank accounts, calendars and emails for many years now, but I still can't do a "text search" across all of them. Isn't the LLM the easy part? How do you link and connect all the different systems you interact with?
  - pj_mukh 2y ago
    I mean at its core operating a bank account, an email and a calendar is just running operations on a browser. LLM's can do that (ex: https://www.skyvern.com https://www.skyvern.com or https://www.gumloop.com https://www.gumloop.com). edit: Though more generally, I can see a future where all these operations are essentially different functions in a function calling system.
    - n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
      Letting an LLM use my banking login is now one of my wordt nightmarrs. Thanks, i hate it.
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switch007 2y ago
Ahh the Dash buttons. I remember those. I remember thinking I'm not a gambling man at all, so what use would that buttons be? Will I pay £5 or £10 today? No thanks lol. Amazon had low trust back then. It's even worse now
Rapzid 2y ago
99% of my Alexa usage is: Kitchen timer What's the weather Shipping and weather alerts So yeah, not sure where the money will come from. I get angry any time Alexa recommends anything.
- julianeon 2y ago
  The other really big use case - actually the majority for me! - is telling Alexa to add things to shopping lists. I have one list I always check when I'm at a physical store or preparing for curbside shopping.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    And I use a steno pad for that.
    - julianeon 2y ago
      In my family a few people add things to the list, from different rooms even, which would be impractical if we were passing a single steno pad around.
      - ghaff 2y ago
        Computer calendars and shopping lists probably make more sense as more people are involved. I just keep a single list.
    - rtpg 2y ago
      What works for a person works of course, but pulling out my phone and just holding down a button and saying "add onions to shopping list" is very helpful halfway through cooking some stuff in a kitchen. Of course I could put that on my fridge and have a marker. But it's "I need my list right now and have almost no free hands to do this" in other parts of the house too (toilet paper etc). Meanwhile my phone is always in my pocket. Maybe time to just keep a pocket pad + pencil in my pocket though...
  - Rapzid 2y ago
anthomtb 2y ago
> people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed... > consumers don't behave like that Computer savvy HN readers don't behave like that. My computer illiterate mother-in-law, on the other hand, kind of does. My brother-in-law got her one of those Google smart speakers years ago and she loved the thing. Finally, a computer to which she could bark orders and have them fulfilled, much like she does to any human within earshot.
- ryukoposting 2y ago
  My parents are more computer-literate than the average late-fifty-somethings, but they aren't HN techies by any means. Having lived with them for about a year, I'd break down their Alexa usage like this: ~90% timers ~8% weather ~2% putting items in a shopping list And I don't recall them ever buying anything via Alexa that they wouldn't have bought on Amazon some other way.
ryukoposting 2y ago
> If they want to salvage Alexa, they need to forget shopping and start doubling down on the smart home and assistant experience. The problem with this approach is that the vast majority of their installed base don't care about the smart home features. The highest margins in smart home equipment are in the high end, as usual. However, Alexa explicitly targeted the mass consumer market. Many of those folks are completely satisfied with a couple of those "smart" switching plug things, which are dirt cheap and totally commoditized. Many others live in apartments, and thus their options for home en-smarttening are very limited. Even if they wanted to go for a costly, sophisticated smart home setup, they can't. Other folks just don't give a damn about smart home tech and are totally satisfied with a thermostat that they must use by walking over to it. Maybe I'm wrong, but my instinct is that Alexa's reach is incompatible with a business model of selling smart home products for profit.
julianeon 2y ago
> Alexa can set timers and tell me the weather, and...that's basically it. My usage is: ~30%: timers ~10%: weather ~60%: tell Alexa to add things to a shopping list, which I use when I'm at a physical store or ready to do a curbside shopping order
- shagie 2y ago
  As an aside, the clock pairs nicely with timers. A sibling of mine who works second and third shift likes it in part because it keeps the time, isn’t illuminated (7 segment leds are out) and the analog aesthetic but without any noise of many analog clocks ticking. I have one in my kitchen (no echo show for exact values on a timer), and it does a nice job with the timers.
markbnj 2y ago
>> Alexa can set timers and tell me the weather, and...that's basically it. I'm not sure if you're intending to be literal or engaging in hyperbole to make a point, but either way it doesn't gel with our experience. Yes, we definitely set timers and ask about the weather... near us, at places we're going to, in the near future, etc. We also ask for a lot of conversions, or adjustments to measurements. My partner is a great cook and she is constantly shouting out to Alexa to convert an amount, find a substitute, confirm a cooking temp and time and things like that. I ask it factual questions all the time and usually it has an answer: these might be history, technology, medicine, whatever. Given the device's low price point and lack of any ongoing subscription it seems like a pretty good value to us, and it will even play some mood music for us while we eat and tell us where our shipment of coffee filters is.
- ghaff 2y ago
  That sounds pretty right. I'll ask for an odd conversion, the weather forecast, set an alarm for the one in my bedroom, but that's about it.
leros 2y ago
I actually used my Alexa like that all the time. "Alexa, order more dish detergent" "From your recent order history, I found Cascade Dish Detergent pods, 120 count, $17.99. Would you like to order?" "Yes" It was super convenient when I was ordering something I had already ordered before, which is all my common purchased.
- 8organicbits 2y ago
  Tangent, have you considered using the powder? It's much cheaper and you can pour the amount you need. The pods only come in large sizes so you're almost always going to be wasting detergent.
  - leros 2y ago
    I've used the detergent before but I find it messy sometimes or it will clog the detergent door. I use the cheap Finish tabs now. The do just as well as the expensive pods.
    - epanchin 2y ago
      I used pods for years after lots of clogged machines with powder. Now I use powder again, cleans clothes so much better and haven’t experienced the same clogging as years ago. I use white vinegar instead of fabric softener as I have sensitive skin, wash sheets on 90C which cleans the machine, and still use pods on short washes.
Jaauthor 2y ago
I mean, yeah - but take a step back from there. Why is this technology only for commerce? Why is technology only useful if it can be economically exploited? That's a deeper issue and not one you can get a ChatGPT-generated answer to. Culturally, we're hostage to psychopath companies and the investors that love them. Nobody in a hedge fund somewhere is going "hey folks, we should add a 'this makes people's lives better' quadrant to our analyst sheets?" Maybe they are and we need time to see the pivot in market forces. I just want to take this moment to go on record that only seeing technology as a profit-making machine defeats the purposes of human progress. Let this be a lesson to the rest of you trying to be the next Amazon - it's not working for them. They're losing billions on Alexa and it's all their fault. You aren't bigger, faster, meaner, or better than Amazon. The only thing you can do - the only thing you must do - is focus on your customers as human beings, not just as cash registers.
- cynicalsecurity 2y ago
  That sounds really noble, but unfortunately, the world revolves around money. It's not just the psychopath hedge funds investors, a sweet old lady living next door to you would start killing and stealing if she suddenly wouldn't have anything to eat. Other systems like communism floped and failed royally. Feufalism or slavery are out of question, they are pure vomit, even though Russians live under feudalism. Business and charity are different things, you can't mix them. Alexa is a lame product. People still have it simply because they feel bad about throwing it out. No one wants smart homes, people want cheap and affordable homes. No customer wants quick or convenient buying process, people are looking for cheap or at least not overpriced products and services instead. And putting way too sophisticated AI in Alexa would be stupidly expensive.
mattmaroon 2y ago
Or, and I know this is a radical idea, but I think it could work, sell the hardware for more than it costs to make. I’m pretty happy with having a speaker in one of my room that can play whatever I want, all at the same time, and some basic assistant functionality. If they cost twice as much, I would still buy them.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >sell the hardware for more than it costs to make. That probably won't work because, at least according to Wikipedia, at some point 10k (!) people worked on Alexa. I'd start at the other end, maybe don't hire an entire Death Star worth of people to develop a voice assistant. That'd probably have saved a few billion here and there.
  - mattmaroon 2y ago
    Well I mean going forward of course. Have to ignore the sunk cost. But yeah they clearly spun their wheels on the software side.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    How can one even organize 10k people adding stuff to the same product?
burnte 2y ago
> The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. This is also why Amazon's Dash buttons failed. As an owner of several Echo devices and a former owner of the Dash buttons, my household LOVED the Dash buttons. Never once have we ordered anything via Alexa, nor do we want to. With the button, you selected the EXACT item with a single button. With Alexa, you have to explain what you want, don't necessarily know the price, seller, etc. It was an all around worse UI for buying. And that's the problem you speak of. No one wants to do that. They made a smart speaker then convinced themselves something ELSE was the killer feature and predicated the finances on that.
- martin_a 2y ago
  > With the button, you selected the EXACT item with a single button. With Alexa, you have to explain what you want, don't necessarily know the price, seller, etc. Hm, but wasn't the price of items ordered through the Dash buttons subject to change, too? Like last week when you set everything up it was $5 per item, but sellers changed and now its $15? Sounds risky to me without checking the order confirmation mails...
  - burnte 2y ago
    They only sold the buttons for specific brand names. The only one that had a brand I used was Charmin, and we had a specific pack size picked. The price was only going to change a little based on the market for toilet paper, so we didn't check it often. I had another for Dial soap but Dial discontinued the product I bought.
apwell23 2y ago
> Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my decision and suddenly order more things. What about 'subscribe and save' on amazon. I never use it, but curious if it has a similar fate as ordering on alexa.
- mbajkowski 2y ago
  Good question. Seems to suffer from same fate. Spot checking 2 years of order history across 2 common personal care products shows at least a 30% variation in price
vostrocity 2y ago
I noticed that in the past year my Alexa speakers have gotten really great at handling long tail fact-finding questions (about history, health, etc.). I use it a few times a week to learn something, when I don't feel like picking up a device. I actually trust it much more than ChatGPT since it never hallucinates and it cites its source.
mhh__ 2y ago
Amazon could have that business model if they hadn't almost completely squandered any trust people had in their listings.
- bentcorner 2y ago
  I think they've squandered it so much that I think it wouldn't be impossible for someone else to build a site with substantial traffic aggregating and sanitizing Amazon results (whether you could profit off of that might be a different question). (I have seen people try this but it's immediately apparent that it's not hand-curated. I think selling that point needs to be priority.)
deleted 2y ago
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2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
The killer-app is playing fart sounds for children. Revolutionary!
ec109685 2y ago
I the Alexa app is also awful. Doesn’t follow any sort of standard design language, doesn’t seem updated in years and fails to help you understand the capability of the device. Something simple like “alert me if my door is unlocked” using a ring device is impossible.
Spooky23 2y ago
Amazon makes more money on shady tactics than making ordering with that sort of mechanism too expensive. Check camel camel… Tide pods vary 25% in price, from ok to ridiculous. When Amazon runs out you’ll get subbed with third party seller (probably stolen) product. If I could use a dash button with Target, I would use it.
fuzztester 2y ago
>The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. is there anything wrong with that? I kind of thought that is one of the main reasons for the existence of companies, that is, to increase sales, and hopefully, profits.
- smt88 2y ago
  What's wrong with it is that it was a stupid idea. People don't shop with their voices and never have. They need to see things.
  - dambi0 2y ago
    Restaurants?
    - tempest_ 2y ago
      Often give or display a menu with prices.
      - dambi0 2y ago
        Often or always? Is reading a generic description of a product (menu) seeing the thing? What about alcoholic drinks in pubs or bars “2 pints of your best and a glass of house red”. Alexa may not be great for purchasing from Amazon but this isn’t because humans have never shopped using only their voices. Nor is seeing things required.
        smt88 2y ago
        People who can see and read almost never use voice-only to shop. Restaurants and catalogs have menus. Street vendors show you their goods. You don't need to take my word for it. No one uses Alexa this way. The proof is in the outcome.
        dambi0 2y ago
a13n 2y ago
I think the move to subscriptions makes a ton of sense from a business perspective. But what value add will they offer that is going to motivate people to buy subscriptions? Maybe it can get bundled into the smart doorbell / camera video storage subscriptions?
DragonStrength 2y ago
They saw “voice” as the next “mobile” and tried to take it over the way Meta wants VR now. The idea of owning a platform the way Apple owns iOS is what drives these companies to delusion.
mandeepj 2y ago
> The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Exactly why Amazon Fire phone failed. So, they didn't learn their lesson. What happened to their leadership principles, specifically - Customer Obsession: Leaders start with the customer and work backwards?
msy 2y ago
It would've worked if Amazon hadn't turned their store into a cesspit of fakes, random 3rd parties sellers and arbitrary pricing. At this point if I pressed one of those buttons I'd have zero confidence in what might turn up. If Costco or the like had those buttons that would add it to a regular delivery I'd plaster the house with them.
- al_borland 2y ago
  This is the core problem. If what I wanted was the first search results every time I searched Amazon, and I had no decisions to make between search and buy... then Alexa could work. That is far from the reality. This is a problem Amazon created, so it's hard to feel bad for them. Not only had this hurt their Alexa dreams, imo it has hurt their brand reputation as well. Amazon is no longer a retailer I trust. I would much rather buy from a more traditional store that doesn't have 3rd party sellers, and maintains standard prices and quantities.
amzsdmthrowaway 2y ago
If that's true, I don't get it is Amazon being metrics driven company didn't see the pattern Alexa is not being used for ordering or orders from Alexa devices is pretty insignificant? Even in 10 years?
Reason077 2y ago
> "This is also why Amazon's Dash buttons failed." Dash buttons failed because they were superseded by Alexa. And because they were a bit silly to begin with.
deleted 2y ago
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wodenokoto 2y ago
I think that could work, but not on Amazon. Their prices are all over the place. I bought a textbook, new on Amazon. Sold by Amazon, dispatched by Amazon. $30. When looking at that same listing it is now $90. I don’t want Alexa to buy me a new bottle of my shampoo when it can be $10 one week at $50 the next. But from Walmart or Target? There’s a price stability where you can basically go shopping without looking at the price tags. A price of a toilet roll won’t explode because of some price algorithm fighting each other.
blindriver 2y ago
The problem is that they thought consumers were dumb and lazy and would just blindly order Tide Pods no matter what the price. That's not how it works, and Amazon lost a lot of trust over the last 10+ years that their prices were the best. They should incorporate AI and allow people to have a conversation. "Alexa, how much are Tide Pods?" "They are $10/pack right now, the last time they were lower was May 2023." "Are these cheaper than Walmart?" "No.", etc. But of course they are so greedy they want to try to funnel people directly into Amazon, and their greed is why they are don't have sales through Alexa.
sholladay 2y ago
This seems like such a solvable problem. It only requires some profile setup. Take the most commonly re-ordered items on Amazon (paper towels, toothbrushes, etc) and have the user select a preferred product, brand, and fallback for each one, as well as a maximum price. Some of that is already implemented for Subscribe & Save and Whole Foods delivery/pickup orders. They could even leverage that existing system. For less common items, first check the user’s purchase history for something similar and announce if the price has increased more than few percentage points or is not in a normal range for the product category. That will cover a lot of cases. For the rest, refer the user to do some research on the computer.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  Nobody wants to go through building a list of common items. I would just leave the door and come back with my toilet paper, bought from the shop, 5 minutes later. Also I don't understand that "let's order household stuff" online randomly and individually example. Sure sometimes you run out of something but I think it mostly happens to people like me who live in small places because we don't have the space to have 3 packs of 6 rolls of toilet paper. But usually people who live in small spaces are usually the ones living in high density places where small groceries shops are always available at walking distance. People who live in suburbs usually have enough storage space and do their shopping of houshold items once a month and never run out of anything.
- Brechreiz 2y ago
  What shmuck orders paper towels on the internet?
  - sholladay 2y ago
    Who you calling a shmuck? /s I have most household items on subscription. It saves a ton of time and costs about the same, maybe a little less for some items. And most importantly, it means I never forget something and then have to make another trip.
    - 2y ago
bradley13 2y ago
It might have worked, if Amazon policed their sellers. However, there are so many poor or scammy sellers, so many counterfeit products, that you really have to scrutinize every order. Aside from books, Amazon has become my last choice as a place to order.
seizethecheese 2y ago
> 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. I don't think this is right. My understanding is the average Dash Button was pressed ~5 times, which isn't bad. The problem was that "subscribe and save" generated more orders than that. For what it's worthy, my company[1] makes a re-ordering IoT device that uses weight to re-order rather than a button click, and we generate more orders than "subscribe and save" programs. This suggests that the problem with Dash was that the habit was not easy to build, not that people wanted to see the product page. [1] bottomless.com
cynicalsecurity 2y ago
Alexa can and also does spy on you and your family.
kristopolous 2y ago
The standard profile from these tech companies is that the consumer is staggeringly, profoundly, unimaginably daft and they're either looking to shop or to have some venal vapid interaction devoid of substance. Google, Facebook, Amazon, this is exactly how they design their products.
baxtr 2y ago
I would love to see their initial “vision doc”, which amazon usually writes for new products. How were they envisioning to make lots of money with it in the first place?
mbesto 2y ago
> The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. Actually they do, just not on Amazon. If you search for 'tide pods' you'll find a WHOLE page of product listings on the first page of the search results full of duplicates and confusing quantity packages. If I do the same on Target.com there are roughly 10~12 products I can actually choose from which is much easier to decipher which one to actually order.
dwighttk 2y ago
It is funny… based on the way Coke (and Pepsi)prices their products (prices all over the place and near constant discounts) they seem to have a critical mass of people that buy their 12pack every time they go the the store no matter the cost.
9dev 2y ago
Add to that that ordering stuff without explicitly stating the total, final price to the customer is illegal in the EU, that was never even going to work everywhere at all...
dns_snek 2y ago
> I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy". This is doubly true ever since they let shady sellers/scammers run free on their platform. I trust AliExpress more than I trust Amazon for any product that isn't explicitly "Sold by Amazon".
brightball 2y ago
Did they stop letting developers build skills or restrict it somehow? A friend of mine used to be very into that but he seemed to sour on the experience last time I talked to him.
ta1243 2y ago
> 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. I wouldn't. Amazon wouldn't be able to stop them selves double-dipping like they did with prime, throwing in adverts etc. Subscription models were fine, until they weren't enough to keep big tech growth placated.
sebstefan 2y ago
They need to make money through an associated line of Alexa compatible products, like smart bulbs, door bells, phones, window shutters, ... It would be very hard to convince me to buy another subscription for something like Alexa. They would be competing with all the other Big Tech subscriptions I'm paying and that budget is limited. There's only space for a few of those before any new ones become a very tough sell.
manojlds 2y ago
Even Amazon Subscribe and Save is untrustworthy with price changes and product changes at times.
sashank_1509 2y ago
> The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. As someone who knows folks that worked on Amazon Alexa (back in its earliest days), this was almost never the focus of Alexa. It might seem cool or trendy to constantly hate on Amazon here on HN, and then somehow tie that to some comment on free market capitalism, Amazon did in fact have very normal ambitions with Alexa, build a smart assistant. Bezos, particularly envisioned building some computer from star-trek as his inspiration. Alexa in its early days was also quite impressive for what they managed to do. It was an example of early ML scaling. They rented hundreds of houses around Seattle, had voice actors talk in different locations in the houses, collected all that data and trained a speech recognition model that was SOTA at the time. Unfortunately while their voice recognition was great, they didn’t apply this scaling approach to natural language understanding. They instead went the root of trying to manually understanding grammar, and iterating all the thousands of possible sentence reconstructions in a large decision tree to help Alexa answer your queries. This of course was hopeless, but this was also almost 5 years before OpenAI released GPT-3 so you can’t fault them for doing essentially what Siri did. Now the issue with Alexa is like most issues big organizations face, they are slow moving and cannot pivot quickly. What they need to do, is actually hard and will need to be done by essentially a monarch CEO, he needs to delete all the work the Alexa teams have done over the last 5 years in 1 swoop and replace it with LLM’s. Many folks in Amazon made their career on improving the Alexa stack, they will of course mostly be defensive and argue vehemently against deleting entirety of Alexa tech “LLM’s hallucinate too much, we need a combined approach”, they will plead, but the stack needs to be deleted, the entire organization needs to pivot to LLMs. Apple has managed to take steps towards this, I won’t be surprised if Amazon soon will, or maybe they won’t, depends on their ability to not be disrupted. If they are guilty of anything, it’s being unable to do good research to discover GPT-3 on their own (though tbf no one except OpenAI did this), and then being unable to ditch all the technical debt they have accumulated over 5+ years and pivot completely into LLM’s.
RajT88 2y ago
There was a noticeable drop in the quality of her ability to understand and answer questions a couple years back. I didn't get one when they came out in 2014, so I can't compare, but the capability is worse than it was when I first got one maybe 5 years ago.
varispeed 2y ago
"Alexa order me Tide Pods" This has many problems. Imagine you are watching a video clip when someone orders a sack of potatoes through Alexa. What is the chance Alexa will place the order? Or say you wanted to order flour and got flowers etc etc. Then pranks. Guests enter your house and say "Alexa order 10 packs of cheese!" and you have to rush to cancel it. Then Amazon has a tonne of spam and rubbish products, what are the chances you get garbage shipped to your house and not the things you wanted.
fwip 2y ago
Out-of-touch execs that don't know how people shop. They love the experience of having a personal assistant they can tell "buy some flowers for my wife," and they aren't price-sensitive. They happily trade off control over the exact purchase for the time savings. From that point of view, a robot assistant that you tell "buy me one banana what could it cost ten dollars," and it automatically buys something from their store - that's a slam dunk.
deleted 2y ago
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2o34jro2j 2y ago
I recently build some smart controls for my residence. Alexa understands the words "Alexa, tell the device to run" about 2/3 of the time, which is infuriating. The other third of the time you end up with "Announcing, 'tell the device to run.'" Put any white noise in the background, a fan blowing, a tea kettle boiling, anything at all, and recognition drops to below 50%. But google isn't any better.
martin_a 2y ago
> Alexa can set timers and tell me the weather, and...that's basically it. And I'm fascinated over and over again on just how bad even that experience sometimes is. Not finding the right song on Spotify, not understanding what I'm asking, trying to push useless information on me and so on.... In the days of LLMs it looks even worse, because I would expect Alexa to use technology like that to give better answers.
mistercow 2y ago
I actually do use Alexa to buy stuff pretty often, but it’s stuff that I’ve already ordered on Amazon, and which I can’t conveniently buy locally, like pure sucralose powder and aeropress filters. And that’s the problem. I’m not shopping with Alexa, because that experience is excruciating. I’m reordering things which I was already going to order through Amazon. They’re not actually generating new sales there; they’re just saving me from having to pull my phone out.
gdilla 2y ago
All i use it for is kitchen timers, occasional weather and traffic check. It's like yelling at your phone, which is slightly better UX than the phone.
dilyevsky 2y ago
> 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". Dash button was great and i stopped using amazon completely over it’s cancellation precisely because i don’t want to go to the app or the website. They canned it because they can’t upsell you on random crap you don’t need
xeromal 2y ago
I think they're moving that way with charging for Amazon music. They could just bundle Amazon music and smarthome features into a little package and probably get some sales
mgh2 2y ago
Is this a failure of the UXR (observational studies) or product team (metrics)?

by paxys 2y ago

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.
  - rainbowzootsuit 2y ago
    This used to be the Sears Kenmore & Craftsman model where appliances were really Whirlpool, or Maytag, Carrier{1}. Hand tools variously came from many OEMs like SK, Plumb, Knipex, and Williams{2}. I suppose they still do, now at Lowes, but the OEM is Chinese. {1}https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/How_to_identify_who_made_your_Kenmore_appliance https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/How_to_identify_who_made_your_Ke... {2}https://forum.toolsinaction.com/topic/2118-craftsman-date-codesstampings/ https://forum.toolsinaction.com/topic/2118-craftsman-date-co...
    - dghlsakjg 2y ago
      The big thing with Sears Craftsman (formerly), and Costco (currently) is that the company will back the product. If I want to return a product to Costco, I have really strong confidence that they will take it back.
      - throwadobe 2y ago
        TBF to Amazon they take all my shit back on the reg
        dghlsakjg 2y ago
        Amazon will accept returns, but not like Costco will or sears did. Sears would exchange any broken craftsman tool for a new one even decades after purchase. Costco is much the same. Used, year old stuff with missing parts will gladly be refunded in full.
        bombcar 2y ago
        To be fair to Costco you have to understand that the way they do that is they just send the item back to the vendor and deduct it from the next purchase. The vendors only option is to not sell stuff to Costco anymore.
        2y ago
- swozey 2y ago
  Costco really needs to get new products in or I don't think it will do well with genz and younger millennials. I hadn't been to a Costco since I was a kid so I had completely forgotten that the only stock (maybe) a few versions of specific items. I went a year or two ago thinking I'd come home with months worth of groceries and I was shocked that it STILL looked like the inside of a 1990s fridge and cabinet with such incredibly healthy options as (only) Sunny Delite and Tropicana for orange juice, massive boxes of Lays chips and cheezits and popcorn. I saw so few items that weren't basically boxes of corn syrup and sugar in some form. There's so many healthier snacks nowadays. I didn't expect a complete grocery experience but I was expecting it to have far more healthy options these days, or even just more options in general. I don't eat any of this stuff. I guess you're a costco family or not. I was a costco family as a kid and had to learn how to eat healthy after shoving soda down all day long my entire childhood. edit: Yeah I'm looking just at their juice section here and there's not a single less-sugar option just as an example https://www.costco.com/juice.html https://www.costco.com/juice.html. Although, damn, $18.99 for 24 ojs is good. But both options are so disgustingly sweet. I had a single OJ for $7 from einsteins yesterday. edit: Go down the orange juice flavor pack "Why do they all taste different" rabbit hole with me.... https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5mpdop/eli5_why_does_orange_juice_from_tropicana_taste/ https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5mpdop/e...
  - meroes 2y ago
    What’s healthier than being able to buy massive amounts of high quality fish and beef and decent quality vegetables and fruit, with zero extra ingredients? Same for legumes, farro, brown rice, etc. They have tons of zero sugar drinks as well. I can’t eat that healthy via other grocery stores because it’s too expensive typically.
  - NickC25 2y ago
    if you want healthier juice....buy a juicer and make it yourself. You're never going to get healthy options from a wholesaler who buys from massive brands that are not known for healthy options. Long term, making it yourself is cheaper too. Most of the time in the juice space, anything that is designed to be shelf-stable in a warehouse is not. at. all. healthy. It's packed with preservatives and other stabilizers that are not good for you to consume. Or it has been pasteurized, which kills the vast majority of the nutrients in the liquid itself. I will say as a caveat, that the Kirkland Signature Organic Coconut Water is quite good.
noveltyaccount 2y ago
To build on the Costco analogy: for any given product category they typically only have three specific options: good, better, best. I could tell Costco bot that I need AA batteries and it would ask me if I prefer Duracell, Kirkland brand, or cheapest. I trust that either of them will be plenty good, so I would say cheapest. Amazon has a vastly different experience with thousands of indistinguishable Chinese knockoffs. I can only ask Alexa for a very specific product, otherwise I don't trust what I'll get. I use Alexa to add products to my cart, which serves as a reminder that I need to do a little more shopping from my phone or PC.
- jprete 2y ago
  To add to your point, one can't even pick out a brand-name product directly from Amazon's website and be sure of getting the real thing.
  - wnc3141 2y ago
    That's been an issue with ordering consumer electronics. I don't know if the item is refurbished, returned,or endorsed by the manufacturer warranty. I basically only order through the manufacturer or best buy these days.
    - sambaumann 2y ago
      Even when amazon shows that you're on the manufacturer store, it still may not be genuine. I bought an intel wifi card off what looked like the official intel store on amazon, but it turns out that it was an out of production model sold by a third party, but amazon showed that it was "Intel". Very confusing and frustrating if you don't know what to look for beforehand.
    - dghlsakjg 2y ago
      Does Best Buy not resell returns?
      - qingcharles 2y ago
paxys 2y ago
> If Costco produced such features in their imaginary product, people may use it. The question is would it make people shop more? If you buy one set of paper towels a week, and Costco rolls out a voice interface, would you now start ordering 2 or 3? If not, what return are they getting on the billions of dollars in additional spending? In reality people would use it for a day, go "neat", and switch right back to the website or app.
- dontlikeyoueith 2y ago
  > The question is would it make people shop more? No, that's not the question. The question is would it make me shop more AT COSTCO. And yes, it would make me shift some of my purchasing from my local grocery store to Costco. Costco is a long drive that's only worth it for large trips. But if I could voice order for shipping or (even better) delivery? My local grocery with its god-awful parking lot full of blind 90-year-olds stuck in reverse would be in serious trouble.
  - paxys 2y ago
    Huh, we are not talking about building a delivery network here. The comparison is between ordering on a website/app and ordering on Alexa.
    - dontlikeyoueith 2y ago
      Do you think you go pick up your Alexa orders at the store?
ashconnor 2y ago
The prices for items in my Amazon cart change multiple times per day. Until they figure out price stability for staple goods then nobody will use this. Hell I don't even use Subscribe and Save for the same reason.
- kyllo 2y ago
  This. I bought toothpaste on Amazon, used it up, and the next time I went to buy the exact same toothpaste, the price had doubled.
  - coliveira 2y ago
    Yes, they have a dark pattern where people buy a product and give good reviews, so suddenly they increase the price to benefit from that.
- bluSCALE4 2y ago
  Same, that's really why it was my sticking point for the post when in reality, getting the wrong item is a bigger issue. Lots of times I'll order something on promo only to have it substituted in the near future for either an inferior product or near double the cost.
Twirrim 2y ago
This is the inherent problem with Amazon's support of 3rd party vendors through their platform, and the general lack of quality controls. I increasingly use specific companies for purchases, because I can't guarantee that what I order through Amazon will actually be the product I wanted, or be at the quality level I'd expect. It's getting to be absolutely awful.
- rendang 2y ago
  This is interesting because you often hear Amazon treats its 3rd party sellers poorly - perhaps they are driving away the quality sellers?
- CSMastermind 2y ago
  Yeah I've largely migrated my purchases off of Amazon for exactly this reason. Checking now, I placed 83 orders last year. I've placed 3 so far this year.

swatcoder 2y ago

> 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. This is compounded by the multi-headed monster that large orgs like theirs have no choice but to become. If customers could trust that every day essentials had a relatively stable price and availability pattern like they trust from their local grocery store (rightly or wrongly), blind ordering might be more tenable. But some other head on the beast wants to keep Amazon shaped like an unmonitored digital marketplace where orders are fulfilled dynamically by bidders and algorithms, so your Tide Pods could be anywhere from $6.99 to $64.99, and you might get anywhere between 10 and 100, and they might arrive tomorrow or next week, and they might come in retail packaging or as a bag of tide-pod-resembling-mystery-objects, etc. Of course blind ordering won't work when you can't give your customers any assurances (let alone guarantees) about price, quality, volume, etc

droopyEyelids 2y ago
This was exactly my problem with the dash buttons, and with Amazon's recurring order system. And I'm not certain, but I believe that sellers game this system- you can see certain things that make sense to order on a recurring schedule have unconscionable prices. Once you have a certain threshold of recurring orders, why not increase the price 10x? Especially because Amazon puts so many dark patterns in the way of a user canceling a "subscription".
- ghaff 2y ago
  I just reordered something I order fairly frequently today. The price is pretty predictable but, yes, I like to just double-check it hasn't doubled in price. Not a big deal to order every few months and confirm it's still what I want to order at the right price as opposed to just putting it on an out of sight, out of mind subscription.
chaostheory 2y ago
Blind ordering only made sense when Amazon customer service was top notch. That ended when Amazon started having profitable quarters and started Day Two. Now I have to be paranoid about checking product details like if there are 3rd party sellers using FBA which potentially signals fakes. There’s no longer blind trust in Amazon for a lot of customers. I can’t just mindlessly buy stuff with the hope that Amazon customer service can take care of anything going wrong like they did years ago.

AlexandrB 2y ago

Some things Amazon did since the introduction of Alexa have definitely worked at cross purposes to a sightless buying experience as well. Maybe I would order a product sight unseen from 2014 era Amazon, but in the intervening time Amazon has been flooded by cheap knock offs including Amazon's own Amazon Basics. Amazon has also started placing promoted products higher in search results. As a result, even searching for a specific brand name doesn't yield the results you would expect.

YetAnotherNick 2y ago

I don't think they tried hard to create an experience user would like. Their shopping features is honestly very lacking. I think Alexa was just because of Amazon's norm of spending very high on R and D. That was the reason AWS was born. No one thought people would pay something like 10x just for consistency in cloud, but here we are. One AWS could cover 20 Alexas.

castlecrasher2 2y ago
I'm not sure there is a good means for buying over voice only, and I'd argue it's only possible to know now that users overwhelmingly prefer digitally handling the product (title, pictures, description, reviews) before making even repeat purchases. Similarly, I'm not sure Amazon could convert consumers to a tablet-based purchasing device like they envisioned Alexa; we all have smart phones and tablets already.
- YetAnotherNick 2y ago
  e.g. I order a particular soap/shampoo or coffee beans every few months. If they had tried recognizing it, they could actually have improved the experience.

simonw 2y ago

> I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy". Especially given the bonfire of trust that is Amazon "sponsored results". Any time I search for anything on Amazon these days I have to spend a bunch of extra time scrolling around trying to figure which of the search results is genuinely a good deal as opposed to one that's paid for placement. Given that, why would I ever trust something like an Alexa to select a good deal for me?

walthamstow 2y ago
Ublock Origin disables all the sponsored stuff and shows your more organic search results. I only see sponsored when I use the Amazon app on my phone.

elpakal 2y ago

> Make it a value add in my life and I wouldn't mind paying a subscription fee for it. I dunno, I feel like the value was priced in the purchase price for me. I would not consider paying both a purchase price and subscription fee for it and probably not a subscription fee at all because all they ever do is go up. What would I do with this dumb robot in my house when I don't agree to pay for their latest fee structure.

paxys 2y ago
Well it's still a speaker, and will still play music. If they bundle in a GPT-5 level personal assistant I can definitely see a ton of people paying the added fee.
gnfargbl 2y ago
Exactly. In our household Alexa is used for playing Spotify, switching some lights on and off, and as an intercom. There is absolutely no chance that I am paying a subscription for a device that is pretty bad as an intercom, and only okay as a light controller/speaker. In fact, this quote from the article is a little concerning: > The new technology would more seamlessly allow users to control functions like smart home devices using their voices rather than opening an app. Problem is, the existing technology can already do this, most of the time. It sounds very much like Amazon is going to try and charge me a monthly fee for something I already have. That's not going to work out.
gregmac 2y ago
This is a problem in general with a whole bunch of products. If I'm paying up-front, the subscription needs to be an optional add-on that provides additional value. The thing should continue working at some base level for its working lifetime, even if I cancel or the service is shut down. If the "base level" on the thing I bought is ever changed after my purchase, the company has burned their trust with me. In fact I'll probably switch away and never buy anything from them again. On the other hand, if they want to build it so a subscription is required to work at all, then I don't want to buy the hardware that I clearly don't actually "own" anyway. It's fair to require paying up-front for a year or two (eg: cell plans) or have a contract requiring a minimum term because obviously the hardware costs something to produce, but in this type of business the product is really the subscription, and the device is just the means of delivery.

dawnerd 2y ago

It's also why subscribe and save ends up being me cancelling or skipping every month. The prices are not stable enough to blindly trust. One month its cheap, next month it'll be 300% increase.

robertlagrant 2y ago

It would be better if Alexa could have shopping lists. "Alexa how much is a box of tide pods? .... Okay, order me the large box with free shipping please." That would be pretty useful. And any subscription good you've already signed up for would be pretty helpful as it would be nice to manage them with a voice interface. But I don't know if it generates billions in revenue.

JoeAltmaier 2y ago

I run my fire tv with it. Context-free search - even if I'm in a video I can just ask "Alexa show me that new movie with Michael Baldwin" or whatever and it goes to the search screen with results. No fooling with a remote, at all. So for that I appreciate Alexa.

jeffh 2y ago

> If they want to salvage Alexa, they need to forget shopping and start doubling down on the smart home and assistant experience [...] and I wouldn't mind paying a subscription fee for it Why do you say that (both parts)? Alexa has done a good job to integrate with lots of other devices. I can control many aspects of my house through Alexa - lights, blinds, AC, sound, etc. I value that, but I don't think I value it enough to ever want to pay a subscription for it. That's as silly as whoever though selling heated seats in your BMW would fly. I made sure that in each home component I chose a solution that works locally (only AC I had to compromise for lack of options). And with all that value it provides as a hub? My alexa can't be used to buy anything, call anyone, etc. None of that is configured or permitted as much as I can shut it down. I don't personally see the value there. I for one am curious where Amazon chooses to draw the line. I don't want to pay a subscription to shout out local hub control commands, but they could be draconian to extra value.

hibikir 2y ago

I'd be happy ordering with a voice assistant if it's at least as good as I am at deciding good alternatives. Imagine I want to, say, purchase garbage bags, because I am out. It's not exactly a complicated product, and yet I might care about whether it has any smell reduction agents, whether the bag is tough enough, the size, and possible alternatives that are either a bit better, or quite a bit cheaper. Either the agent understands my preferences, or I am not going to trust it. And as we look at Amazon's webpage, we first have straight out ads, then a few items it hopes I might buy that are typically related to what other people buy, and maybe a mention of what I bought before, but no understanding of why I bought that one. It's not a very easy task, and one where it's easy to lose trust

ghaff 2y ago
On the other hand, I have--for better or worse--default brands for most of that stuff and I go to a Walmart every six months and load up my cart.
playingalong 2y ago
The system could simply default to whatever I picked the latest (or same brand).

ern 2y ago

I would consider using Alexa to buy things if it understood what I wanted. It rarely does. Asking it to list subscriptions, for example doesn’t work. Trying to get it to set up anything beyond a simple timer is a hit-and-miss affair. The fact that they could be finally fixing this, and then are putting it behind a paywall is ironic, because if it finally works properly, people could actually start using it for buying stuff.

JamesSwift 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. I disagree. The issue here is they had a really great use-case and utterly failed to deliver to the end user. No one is requesting their smart assistants to order anything because there is absolutely no support on the platforms + absolutely no user trust of how that is going to go. If all they ever did was niche their assistant down to being a smart shopping list, it would have been a great product, and likely would have driven sales. Instead they failed at even the thing they would have been had an advantage on (selling things to customers who are buying from them directly). Google and apple would have been operating through a black box of "privacy preserving apis" to do the same with their own integrations. Then they proceeded to suck at the stuff all the other assistants also suck at.

crorella 2y ago

This, plus the fact many of the products sold by Amazon now are fakes and low quality items. I almost never order from Amazon now and doing it blindly via Alexa is not an option.

mikehollinger 2y ago

>If they want to salvage Alexa, they need to forget shopping and start doubling down on the smart home and assistant experience. Agree. Go look at the Alexa Skills for any random category and sort by "best sellers," then sort again by "average review." There isn't an ecosystem. For Lifestyle, the "4th best selling" [1] skill is "North American Roofing," which is for a company in Tampa. There should be more there. Given the devices with a touch-sensitive screen, some form of presence detection, location awareness, and other things, there's a lot of missed potential there. [1] https://www.amazon.com/s?i=alexa-skills&bbn=13727922011&rh=n%3A13727921011%2Cn%3A14284837011&s=exact-aware-popularity-rank&dc&qid=1721854718&rnid=13727922011&ref=sr_st_exact-aware-popularity-rank&ds=v1%3ATmlYgPdQt8csGYqYXgCKxyu0sQnmSAnvPJpLUS4vLGQ https://www.amazon.com/s?i=alexa-skills&bbn=13727922011&rh=n...

ghaff 2y ago
I have basically zero interest in "smart home" features and I'm not sure what "assistant experience" means at the current level of technology. It certainly isn't an admin with a roughly middle of the pack level of savvy much less the actual exec admin that I would want.

deanCommie 2y ago

What do you need Alexa to do with your smart home that it can't do today? https://www.amazon.com/alexa-smart-home/b?ie=UTF8&node=21442899011 https://www.amazon.com/alexa-smart-home/b?ie=UTF8&node=21442... Seems like the voice-smart-home problem is the same as the voice-shopping problem: There is a limit to how many features you can/want to support in a voice interface.

Domenic_S 2y ago
It just sucks. I get non-deterministic reactions from "turn off the lights" vs "turn off every light" vs "all lights off".. one of those phrases eventually works. I had to set up a custom action ("goodnight") to reliably do the thing. If they focused on getting voice control for home automation perfect, it could be a real winner.

swozey 2y ago

With how much Amazon pricing fluctuates I definitely want to see the page before I buy. y protein powder that was, I think $50s pre-2020 is now $80ish. Sigh. Goodbye Hydrowhey, back to the chalky stuff.

Terretta 2y ago

> How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods"... The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. A bigger problem is their kids do.

smrtinsert 2y ago

I would not give Amazon control over my home. That's too far. I want a company that focuses on security.

mymyairduster 2y ago
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pj_mukh 2y ago

What I want is a truly personal assistant (which LLM's should be capable of). Alexa can barely get me answers to google-able questions. If I could be assured of privacy issues, I'd be happy to give it access to my email, calendar, bank accounts etc. and then let me just use it like a Chief of Staff. I know another company is going to come do this, but it's crazy that that company may not be Alexa/Google.

willsmith72 2y ago
Why is that so simple? I've had online bank accounts, calendars and emails for many years now, but I still can't do a "text search" across all of them. Isn't the LLM the easy part? How do you link and connect all the different systems you interact with?
- pj_mukh 2y ago
  I mean at its core operating a bank account, an email and a calendar is just running operations on a browser. LLM's can do that (ex: https://www.skyvern.com https://www.skyvern.com or https://www.gumloop.com https://www.gumloop.com). edit: Though more generally, I can see a future where all these operations are essentially different functions in a function calling system.
  - n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
    Letting an LLM use my banking login is now one of my wordt nightmarrs. Thanks, i hate it.

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switch007 2y ago

Ahh the Dash buttons. I remember those. I remember thinking I'm not a gambling man at all, so what use would that buttons be? Will I pay £5 or £10 today? No thanks lol. Amazon had low trust back then. It's even worse now

Rapzid 2y ago

99% of my Alexa usage is: Kitchen timer What's the weather Shipping and weather alerts So yeah, not sure where the money will come from. I get angry any time Alexa recommends anything.

julianeon 2y ago
The other really big use case - actually the majority for me! - is telling Alexa to add things to shopping lists. I have one list I always check when I'm at a physical store or preparing for curbside shopping.
- ghaff 2y ago
  And I use a steno pad for that.
  - julianeon 2y ago
    In my family a few people add things to the list, from different rooms even, which would be impractical if we were passing a single steno pad around.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      Computer calendars and shopping lists probably make more sense as more people are involved. I just keep a single list.
  - rtpg 2y ago
    What works for a person works of course, but pulling out my phone and just holding down a button and saying "add onions to shopping list" is very helpful halfway through cooking some stuff in a kitchen. Of course I could put that on my fridge and have a marker. But it's "I need my list right now and have almost no free hands to do this" in other parts of the house too (toilet paper etc). Meanwhile my phone is always in my pocket. Maybe time to just keep a pocket pad + pencil in my pocket though...
- Rapzid 2y ago

anthomtb 2y ago

> people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed... > consumers don't behave like that Computer savvy HN readers don't behave like that. My computer illiterate mother-in-law, on the other hand, kind of does. My brother-in-law got her one of those Google smart speakers years ago and she loved the thing. Finally, a computer to which she could bark orders and have them fulfilled, much like she does to any human within earshot.

ryukoposting 2y ago
My parents are more computer-literate than the average late-fifty-somethings, but they aren't HN techies by any means. Having lived with them for about a year, I'd break down their Alexa usage like this: ~90% timers ~8% weather ~2% putting items in a shopping list And I don't recall them ever buying anything via Alexa that they wouldn't have bought on Amazon some other way.

ryukoposting 2y ago

> If they want to salvage Alexa, they need to forget shopping and start doubling down on the smart home and assistant experience. The problem with this approach is that the vast majority of their installed base don't care about the smart home features. The highest margins in smart home equipment are in the high end, as usual. However, Alexa explicitly targeted the mass consumer market. Many of those folks are completely satisfied with a couple of those "smart" switching plug things, which are dirt cheap and totally commoditized. Many others live in apartments, and thus their options for home en-smarttening are very limited. Even if they wanted to go for a costly, sophisticated smart home setup, they can't. Other folks just don't give a damn about smart home tech and are totally satisfied with a thermostat that they must use by walking over to it. Maybe I'm wrong, but my instinct is that Alexa's reach is incompatible with a business model of selling smart home products for profit.

julianeon 2y ago

> Alexa can set timers and tell me the weather, and...that's basically it. My usage is: ~30%: timers ~10%: weather ~60%: tell Alexa to add things to a shopping list, which I use when I'm at a physical store or ready to do a curbside shopping order

shagie 2y ago
As an aside, the clock pairs nicely with timers. A sibling of mine who works second and third shift likes it in part because it keeps the time, isn’t illuminated (7 segment leds are out) and the analog aesthetic but without any noise of many analog clocks ticking. I have one in my kitchen (no echo show for exact values on a timer), and it does a nice job with the timers.

markbnj 2y ago

>> Alexa can set timers and tell me the weather, and...that's basically it. I'm not sure if you're intending to be literal or engaging in hyperbole to make a point, but either way it doesn't gel with our experience. Yes, we definitely set timers and ask about the weather... near us, at places we're going to, in the near future, etc. We also ask for a lot of conversions, or adjustments to measurements. My partner is a great cook and she is constantly shouting out to Alexa to convert an amount, find a substitute, confirm a cooking temp and time and things like that. I ask it factual questions all the time and usually it has an answer: these might be history, technology, medicine, whatever. Given the device's low price point and lack of any ongoing subscription it seems like a pretty good value to us, and it will even play some mood music for us while we eat and tell us where our shipment of coffee filters is.

ghaff 2y ago
That sounds pretty right. I'll ask for an odd conversion, the weather forecast, set an alarm for the one in my bedroom, but that's about it.

leros 2y ago

I actually used my Alexa like that all the time. "Alexa, order more dish detergent" "From your recent order history, I found Cascade Dish Detergent pods, 120 count, $17.99. Would you like to order?" "Yes" It was super convenient when I was ordering something I had already ordered before, which is all my common purchased.

8organicbits 2y ago
Tangent, have you considered using the powder? It's much cheaper and you can pour the amount you need. The pods only come in large sizes so you're almost always going to be wasting detergent.
- leros 2y ago
  I've used the detergent before but I find it messy sometimes or it will clog the detergent door. I use the cheap Finish tabs now. The do just as well as the expensive pods.
  - epanchin 2y ago
    I used pods for years after lots of clogged machines with powder. Now I use powder again, cleans clothes so much better and haven’t experienced the same clogging as years ago. I use white vinegar instead of fabric softener as I have sensitive skin, wash sheets on 90C which cleans the machine, and still use pods on short washes.

Jaauthor 2y ago

I mean, yeah - but take a step back from there. Why is this technology only for commerce? Why is technology only useful if it can be economically exploited? That's a deeper issue and not one you can get a ChatGPT-generated answer to. Culturally, we're hostage to psychopath companies and the investors that love them. Nobody in a hedge fund somewhere is going "hey folks, we should add a 'this makes people's lives better' quadrant to our analyst sheets?" Maybe they are and we need time to see the pivot in market forces. I just want to take this moment to go on record that only seeing technology as a profit-making machine defeats the purposes of human progress. Let this be a lesson to the rest of you trying to be the next Amazon - it's not working for them. They're losing billions on Alexa and it's all their fault. You aren't bigger, faster, meaner, or better than Amazon. The only thing you can do - the only thing you must do - is focus on your customers as human beings, not just as cash registers.

cynicalsecurity 2y ago
That sounds really noble, but unfortunately, the world revolves around money. It's not just the psychopath hedge funds investors, a sweet old lady living next door to you would start killing and stealing if she suddenly wouldn't have anything to eat. Other systems like communism floped and failed royally. Feufalism or slavery are out of question, they are pure vomit, even though Russians live under feudalism. Business and charity are different things, you can't mix them. Alexa is a lame product. People still have it simply because they feel bad about throwing it out. No one wants smart homes, people want cheap and affordable homes. No customer wants quick or convenient buying process, people are looking for cheap or at least not overpriced products and services instead. And putting way too sophisticated AI in Alexa would be stupidly expensive.

mattmaroon 2y ago

Or, and I know this is a radical idea, but I think it could work, sell the hardware for more than it costs to make. I’m pretty happy with having a speaker in one of my room that can play whatever I want, all at the same time, and some basic assistant functionality. If they cost twice as much, I would still buy them.

Barrin92 2y ago
>sell the hardware for more than it costs to make. That probably won't work because, at least according to Wikipedia, at some point 10k (!) people worked on Alexa. I'd start at the other end, maybe don't hire an entire Death Star worth of people to develop a voice assistant. That'd probably have saved a few billion here and there.
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  Well I mean going forward of course. Have to ignore the sunk cost. But yeah they clearly spun their wheels on the software side.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  How can one even organize 10k people adding stuff to the same product?

burnte 2y ago

> The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. This is also why Amazon's Dash buttons failed. As an owner of several Echo devices and a former owner of the Dash buttons, my household LOVED the Dash buttons. Never once have we ordered anything via Alexa, nor do we want to. With the button, you selected the EXACT item with a single button. With Alexa, you have to explain what you want, don't necessarily know the price, seller, etc. It was an all around worse UI for buying. And that's the problem you speak of. No one wants to do that. They made a smart speaker then convinced themselves something ELSE was the killer feature and predicated the finances on that.

martin_a 2y ago
> With the button, you selected the EXACT item with a single button. With Alexa, you have to explain what you want, don't necessarily know the price, seller, etc. Hm, but wasn't the price of items ordered through the Dash buttons subject to change, too? Like last week when you set everything up it was $5 per item, but sellers changed and now its $15? Sounds risky to me without checking the order confirmation mails...
- burnte 2y ago
  They only sold the buttons for specific brand names. The only one that had a brand I used was Charmin, and we had a specific pack size picked. The price was only going to change a little based on the market for toilet paper, so we didn't check it often. I had another for Dial soap but Dial discontinued the product I bought.

apwell23 2y ago

> Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my decision and suddenly order more things. What about 'subscribe and save' on amazon. I never use it, but curious if it has a similar fate as ordering on alexa.

mbajkowski 2y ago
Good question. Seems to suffer from same fate. Spot checking 2 years of order history across 2 common personal care products shows at least a 30% variation in price

vostrocity 2y ago

I noticed that in the past year my Alexa speakers have gotten really great at handling long tail fact-finding questions (about history, health, etc.). I use it a few times a week to learn something, when I don't feel like picking up a device. I actually trust it much more than ChatGPT since it never hallucinates and it cites its source.

mhh__ 2y ago

Amazon could have that business model if they hadn't almost completely squandered any trust people had in their listings.

bentcorner 2y ago
I think they've squandered it so much that I think it wouldn't be impossible for someone else to build a site with substantial traffic aggregating and sanitizing Amazon results (whether you could profit off of that might be a different question). (I have seen people try this but it's immediately apparent that it's not hand-curated. I think selling that point needs to be priority.)

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2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

The killer-app is playing fart sounds for children. Revolutionary!

ec109685 2y ago

I the Alexa app is also awful. Doesn’t follow any sort of standard design language, doesn’t seem updated in years and fails to help you understand the capability of the device. Something simple like “alert me if my door is unlocked” using a ring device is impossible.

Spooky23 2y ago

Amazon makes more money on shady tactics than making ordering with that sort of mechanism too expensive. Check camel camel… Tide pods vary 25% in price, from ok to ridiculous. When Amazon runs out you’ll get subbed with third party seller (probably stolen) product. If I could use a dash button with Target, I would use it.

fuzztester 2y ago

>The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. is there anything wrong with that? I kind of thought that is one of the main reasons for the existence of companies, that is, to increase sales, and hopefully, profits.

smt88 2y ago
What's wrong with it is that it was a stupid idea. People don't shop with their voices and never have. They need to see things.
- dambi0 2y ago
  Restaurants?
  - tempest_ 2y ago
    Often give or display a menu with prices.
    - dambi0 2y ago
      Often or always? Is reading a generic description of a product (menu) seeing the thing? What about alcoholic drinks in pubs or bars “2 pints of your best and a glass of house red”. Alexa may not be great for purchasing from Amazon but this isn’t because humans have never shopped using only their voices. Nor is seeing things required.
      - smt88 2y ago
        People who can see and read almost never use voice-only to shop. Restaurants and catalogs have menus. Street vendors show you their goods. You don't need to take my word for it. No one uses Alexa this way. The proof is in the outcome.
        dambi0 2y ago

a13n 2y ago

I think the move to subscriptions makes a ton of sense from a business perspective. But what value add will they offer that is going to motivate people to buy subscriptions? Maybe it can get bundled into the smart doorbell / camera video storage subscriptions?

DragonStrength 2y ago

They saw “voice” as the next “mobile” and tried to take it over the way Meta wants VR now. The idea of owning a platform the way Apple owns iOS is what drives these companies to delusion.

mandeepj 2y ago

> The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Exactly why Amazon Fire phone failed. So, they didn't learn their lesson. What happened to their leadership principles, specifically - Customer Obsession: Leaders start with the customer and work backwards?

msy 2y ago

It would've worked if Amazon hadn't turned their store into a cesspit of fakes, random 3rd parties sellers and arbitrary pricing. At this point if I pressed one of those buttons I'd have zero confidence in what might turn up. If Costco or the like had those buttons that would add it to a regular delivery I'd plaster the house with them.

al_borland 2y ago
This is the core problem. If what I wanted was the first search results every time I searched Amazon, and I had no decisions to make between search and buy... then Alexa could work. That is far from the reality. This is a problem Amazon created, so it's hard to feel bad for them. Not only had this hurt their Alexa dreams, imo it has hurt their brand reputation as well. Amazon is no longer a retailer I trust. I would much rather buy from a more traditional store that doesn't have 3rd party sellers, and maintains standard prices and quantities.

amzsdmthrowaway 2y ago

If that's true, I don't get it is Amazon being metrics driven company didn't see the pattern Alexa is not being used for ordering or orders from Alexa devices is pretty insignificant? Even in 10 years?

Reason077 2y ago

> "This is also why Amazon's Dash buttons failed." Dash buttons failed because they were superseded by Alexa. And because they were a bit silly to begin with.

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wodenokoto 2y ago

I think that could work, but not on Amazon. Their prices are all over the place. I bought a textbook, new on Amazon. Sold by Amazon, dispatched by Amazon. $30. When looking at that same listing it is now $90. I don’t want Alexa to buy me a new bottle of my shampoo when it can be $10 one week at $50 the next. But from Walmart or Target? There’s a price stability where you can basically go shopping without looking at the price tags. A price of a toilet roll won’t explode because of some price algorithm fighting each other.

blindriver 2y ago

The problem is that they thought consumers were dumb and lazy and would just blindly order Tide Pods no matter what the price. That's not how it works, and Amazon lost a lot of trust over the last 10+ years that their prices were the best. They should incorporate AI and allow people to have a conversation. "Alexa, how much are Tide Pods?" "They are $10/pack right now, the last time they were lower was May 2023." "Are these cheaper than Walmart?" "No.", etc. But of course they are so greedy they want to try to funnel people directly into Amazon, and their greed is why they are don't have sales through Alexa.

sholladay 2y ago

This seems like such a solvable problem. It only requires some profile setup. Take the most commonly re-ordered items on Amazon (paper towels, toothbrushes, etc) and have the user select a preferred product, brand, and fallback for each one, as well as a maximum price. Some of that is already implemented for Subscribe & Save and Whole Foods delivery/pickup orders. They could even leverage that existing system. For less common items, first check the user’s purchase history for something similar and announce if the price has increased more than few percentage points or is not in a normal range for the product category. That will cover a lot of cases. For the rest, refer the user to do some research on the computer.

prmoustache 2y ago
Nobody wants to go through building a list of common items. I would just leave the door and come back with my toilet paper, bought from the shop, 5 minutes later. Also I don't understand that "let's order household stuff" online randomly and individually example. Sure sometimes you run out of something but I think it mostly happens to people like me who live in small places because we don't have the space to have 3 packs of 6 rolls of toilet paper. But usually people who live in small spaces are usually the ones living in high density places where small groceries shops are always available at walking distance. People who live in suburbs usually have enough storage space and do their shopping of houshold items once a month and never run out of anything.
Brechreiz 2y ago
What shmuck orders paper towels on the internet?
- sholladay 2y ago
  Who you calling a shmuck? /s I have most household items on subscription. It saves a ton of time and costs about the same, maybe a little less for some items. And most importantly, it means I never forget something and then have to make another trip.
  - 2y ago

bradley13 2y ago

It might have worked, if Amazon policed their sellers. However, there are so many poor or scammy sellers, so many counterfeit products, that you really have to scrutinize every order. Aside from books, Amazon has become my last choice as a place to order.

seizethecheese 2y ago

> 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. I don't think this is right. My understanding is the average Dash Button was pressed ~5 times, which isn't bad. The problem was that "subscribe and save" generated more orders than that. For what it's worthy, my company[1] makes a re-ordering IoT device that uses weight to re-order rather than a button click, and we generate more orders than "subscribe and save" programs. This suggests that the problem with Dash was that the habit was not easy to build, not that people wanted to see the product page. [1] bottomless.com

cynicalsecurity 2y ago

Alexa can and also does spy on you and your family.

kristopolous 2y ago

The standard profile from these tech companies is that the consumer is staggeringly, profoundly, unimaginably daft and they're either looking to shop or to have some venal vapid interaction devoid of substance. Google, Facebook, Amazon, this is exactly how they design their products.

baxtr 2y ago

I would love to see their initial “vision doc”, which amazon usually writes for new products. How were they envisioning to make lots of money with it in the first place?

mbesto 2y ago

> The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. Actually they do, just not on Amazon. If you search for 'tide pods' you'll find a WHOLE page of product listings on the first page of the search results full of duplicates and confusing quantity packages. If I do the same on Target.com there are roughly 10~12 products I can actually choose from which is much easier to decipher which one to actually order.

dwighttk 2y ago

It is funny… based on the way Coke (and Pepsi)prices their products (prices all over the place and near constant discounts) they seem to have a critical mass of people that buy their 12pack every time they go the the store no matter the cost.

9dev 2y ago

Add to that that ordering stuff without explicitly stating the total, final price to the customer is illegal in the EU, that was never even going to work everywhere at all...

dns_snek 2y ago

> I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy". This is doubly true ever since they let shady sellers/scammers run free on their platform. I trust AliExpress more than I trust Amazon for any product that isn't explicitly "Sold by Amazon".

brightball 2y ago

Did they stop letting developers build skills or restrict it somehow? A friend of mine used to be very into that but he seemed to sour on the experience last time I talked to him.

ta1243 2y ago

> 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. I wouldn't. Amazon wouldn't be able to stop them selves double-dipping like they did with prime, throwing in adverts etc. Subscription models were fine, until they weren't enough to keep big tech growth placated.

sebstefan 2y ago

They need to make money through an associated line of Alexa compatible products, like smart bulbs, door bells, phones, window shutters, ... It would be very hard to convince me to buy another subscription for something like Alexa. They would be competing with all the other Big Tech subscriptions I'm paying and that budget is limited. There's only space for a few of those before any new ones become a very tough sell.

manojlds 2y ago

Even Amazon Subscribe and Save is untrustworthy with price changes and product changes at times.

sashank_1509 2y ago

> The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. As someone who knows folks that worked on Amazon Alexa (back in its earliest days), this was almost never the focus of Alexa. It might seem cool or trendy to constantly hate on Amazon here on HN, and then somehow tie that to some comment on free market capitalism, Amazon did in fact have very normal ambitions with Alexa, build a smart assistant. Bezos, particularly envisioned building some computer from star-trek as his inspiration. Alexa in its early days was also quite impressive for what they managed to do. It was an example of early ML scaling. They rented hundreds of houses around Seattle, had voice actors talk in different locations in the houses, collected all that data and trained a speech recognition model that was SOTA at the time. Unfortunately while their voice recognition was great, they didn’t apply this scaling approach to natural language understanding. They instead went the root of trying to manually understanding grammar, and iterating all the thousands of possible sentence reconstructions in a large decision tree to help Alexa answer your queries. This of course was hopeless, but this was also almost 5 years before OpenAI released GPT-3 so you can’t fault them for doing essentially what Siri did. Now the issue with Alexa is like most issues big organizations face, they are slow moving and cannot pivot quickly. What they need to do, is actually hard and will need to be done by essentially a monarch CEO, he needs to delete all the work the Alexa teams have done over the last 5 years in 1 swoop and replace it with LLM’s. Many folks in Amazon made their career on improving the Alexa stack, they will of course mostly be defensive and argue vehemently against deleting entirety of Alexa tech “LLM’s hallucinate too much, we need a combined approach”, they will plead, but the stack needs to be deleted, the entire organization needs to pivot to LLMs. Apple has managed to take steps towards this, I won’t be surprised if Amazon soon will, or maybe they won’t, depends on their ability to not be disrupted. If they are guilty of anything, it’s being unable to do good research to discover GPT-3 on their own (though tbf no one except OpenAI did this), and then being unable to ditch all the technical debt they have accumulated over 5+ years and pivot completely into LLM’s.

RajT88 2y ago

There was a noticeable drop in the quality of her ability to understand and answer questions a couple years back. I didn't get one when they came out in 2014, so I can't compare, but the capability is worse than it was when I first got one maybe 5 years ago.

varispeed 2y ago

"Alexa order me Tide Pods" This has many problems. Imagine you are watching a video clip when someone orders a sack of potatoes through Alexa. What is the chance Alexa will place the order? Or say you wanted to order flour and got flowers etc etc. Then pranks. Guests enter your house and say "Alexa order 10 packs of cheese!" and you have to rush to cancel it. Then Amazon has a tonne of spam and rubbish products, what are the chances you get garbage shipped to your house and not the things you wanted.

fwip 2y ago

Out-of-touch execs that don't know how people shop. They love the experience of having a personal assistant they can tell "buy some flowers for my wife," and they aren't price-sensitive. They happily trade off control over the exact purchase for the time savings. From that point of view, a robot assistant that you tell "buy me one banana what could it cost ten dollars," and it automatically buys something from their store - that's a slam dunk.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

2o34jro2j 2y ago

I recently build some smart controls for my residence. Alexa understands the words "Alexa, tell the device to run" about 2/3 of the time, which is infuriating. The other third of the time you end up with "Announcing, 'tell the device to run.'" Put any white noise in the background, a fan blowing, a tea kettle boiling, anything at all, and recognition drops to below 50%. But google isn't any better.

martin_a 2y ago

> Alexa can set timers and tell me the weather, and...that's basically it. And I'm fascinated over and over again on just how bad even that experience sometimes is. Not finding the right song on Spotify, not understanding what I'm asking, trying to push useless information on me and so on.... In the days of LLMs it looks even worse, because I would expect Alexa to use technology like that to give better answers.

mistercow 2y ago

I actually do use Alexa to buy stuff pretty often, but it’s stuff that I’ve already ordered on Amazon, and which I can’t conveniently buy locally, like pure sucralose powder and aeropress filters. And that’s the problem. I’m not shopping with Alexa, because that experience is excruciating. I’m reordering things which I was already going to order through Amazon. They’re not actually generating new sales there; they’re just saving me from having to pull my phone out.

gdilla 2y ago

All i use it for is kitchen timers, occasional weather and traffic check. It's like yelling at your phone, which is slightly better UX than the phone.

dilyevsky 2y ago

> 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". Dash button was great and i stopped using amazon completely over it’s cancellation precisely because i don’t want to go to the app or the website. They canned it because they can’t upsell you on random crap you don’t need

xeromal 2y ago

I think they're moving that way with charging for Amazon music. They could just bundle Amazon music and smarthome features into a little package and probably get some sales

mgh2 2y ago

Is this a failure of the UXR (observational studies) or product team (metrics)?