6 ms·

For me the Alexa devices I own have gotten worse. Can't do simple things (setting a timer used to be instant, now it takes 10-15 seconds of thinking assuming it

For me the Alexa devices I own have gotten worse. Can't do simple things (setting a timer used to be instant, now it takes 10-15 seconds of thinking assuming it heard properly), playing music is a joke (will try to play through Deezer even though I disaled that integration months ago, and then will default to Amazon Music instead of Spotify which is set as the default). And then even simple skills can't understand what I'm asking 60% of the time. The first maybe 2 years after launch it seemed like everything worked pretty good but since then it's been a frustrating decline. Currently they are relagated to timers and music, and it can't even manage those half the time anymore.

interludead 2y ago
That aligns with some of the frustration I’ve heard from others. It’s surprising (and disappointing) how these platforms, which seemed to have so much potential early on, have started to feel more like a liability
lelag 2y ago
It is, I think, a common feeling among Echo/Alexa users. Now that people are getting used to the amazing understanding capabilities of ChatGPT and the likes, it probably increases the frustration level because you get a hint of how good it could be. I believe it boils down to two main issues: - The narrow AI systems used for intent inference have not scaled with the product features. - Amazon is stuck and can't significantly improve it using general AI due to costs. The first point is that the speech-to-intent algorithms currently in production are quite basic, likely based on the state of the art from 2013. Initially, there were few features available, so the device was fairly effective at inferring what you wanted from a limited set of possibilities. Over time, Amazon introduced more and more features to choose from, but the devices didn't get any smarter. As a result, mismatches between actual intent and inferred intent became more common, giving the impression that the device is getting dumber. In truth, it’s probably getting somewhat smarter, but not enough to compensate for the increasing complexity over time. The second point is that, clearly, it would be relatively straightforward to create a much smarter Alexa: simply delegate the intent detection to an LLM. However, Amazon can’t do that. By 2019, there were already over 100 million Alexa devices in circulation, and it’s reasonable to assume that number has at least doubled by now. These devices are likely sold at a low margin, and the service is free. If you start requiring GPUs to process millions of daily requests, you would need an enormous, costly infrastructure, which is probably impossible to justify financially—and perhaps even infeasible given the sheer scale of the product. My prediction is that Amazon cannot save the product, and it will die a slow death. It will probably keep working for years but will likely be relegated by most users to a "dumb" device capable of little more than setting alarms, timers, and providing weather reports. If you want Jarvis-like intelligence to control your home automation system, the vision of a local assistant using local AI on an efficient GPU, as presented by HA, is the one with the most chance of succeeding. Beyond the privacy benefits of processing everything locally, the primary reason this approach may become common is that it scales linearly with the installation. If you had a cloud-based solution using Echo-like devices, the problem is that you’d need to scale your cloud infrastructure as you sell more devices. If the service is good, this could become a major challenge. In contrast, if you sell an expensive box with an integrated GPU that does everything locally, you deploy the infrastructure as you sell the product. This eliminates scaling issues and the risks of growing too fast.
- freedomben 2y ago
  It seems ridiculous to me that this comment is so down voted. It's a thoughtful and interesting comment, and contains a reasonable and even likely explanation for what we've seen, once one puts aside the bottom that Amazon is just evil, which isn't a useful way to think of you truly want to understand the world and motivations. I'm guessing people reflexively down vote because they hate Amazon and it could read like a defense. I hate Amazon too, but emotional voting is unbecoming of HN. If you want emotional voting reddit is available and enormous.
  - imiric 2y ago
    I didn't downvote it, but claiming that Echo/Alexa are behind because of financial reasons is misguided at best. Amazon is one of the richest companies on the planet, with vast datacenters that power large parts of the internet. If they wanted to improve their AI products they certainly have the resources to do so.
    - thanksgiving 2y ago
      How do you justify to your manager to spend (and more importantly commit to spending for a long time) hundreds of millions of dollars in aws resources every year? Sure, you already have the hardware but that's a different org, right? You can't expect them to give you those resources for free. Also, voice needs to be instant. You can't say 'Well, the AWS instances are currently expensive. Try again when my spot prices are lower." I am sure you know this but maybe some don't know that basically only the hot word detection is on device. It needs to be connected to the Internet for basically everything else. It already costs Amazon.com some money to run this infrastructure. What we are asking will cost more and you can't really charge the users more. I personally would definitely not sign up for a paid subscription to use Amazon Alexa.
    - baq 2y ago
      Alexa is probably a cool billion under or something. They never figured out how to make money with it.
    - 2y ago
IgorPartola 2y ago
That’s interesting because I have a bunch of Echos of various types in my house and my timers and answers are instant. Is it possible your internet connection is wonky or you have a slow DNS server or congested Wi-Fi? I don’t have the absolute newest devices but the one in my bedroom is the very original Echo that I got during their preview stage, the one in my kitchen is the Echo Show 7” and I have a bunch of puck ones and spherical ones (don’t remember the generations) around the house. One did die at one point after years of use and got replaced but it was in my kids room so I suspect it was subject to some abuse.
- creeble 2y ago
  I too get pretty consistent response and answers from Alexa these days. There has been some vague decline in the quality of answers (I think sometime back they removed the ability to ask for Wikipedia data), but have no trouble with timers and the few linked wemo switches I have. I’m also the author of an Alexa skill for a music player (basic “transport” control mostly) that i use every day, and it still works the same as it always did. Occasionally I’ll get some freakout answer or abject failure to reply, but it’s fairly rare. I did notice it was down for a whole weekend once; that’s surely related to staffing or priorities.
mrweasel 2y ago
Amazon also fired a large number of people from the Alexa team last year. I don't really think Alexa is a major priority for Amazon at this point. I don't blame them, sure there are millions of devices out there, but some people might own five device. So there aren't as many users as there are devices and they aren't making them any money once bought, not like the Kindle. Frankly I know shockingly few people who uses Siri/Alexa/Google Assistant/Bixby. It's not that voice assistants don't have a use, be it is a much much small use case than initially envisioned and there's no longer the money to found the development, the funds went into blockchain and LLMs. Partly the decline is because it's not as natural an interface as we expected, secondly: to be actually useful, the assistants need access to control things that we may not be comfortable with, or which may pose a liability to the manufacturers.

interludead 2y ago

That aligns with some of the frustration I’ve heard from others. It’s surprising (and disappointing) how these platforms, which seemed to have so much potential early on, have started to feel more like a liability

lelag 2y ago

It is, I think, a common feeling among Echo/Alexa users. Now that people are getting used to the amazing understanding capabilities of ChatGPT and the likes, it probably increases the frustration level because you get a hint of how good it could be. I believe it boils down to two main issues: - The narrow AI systems used for intent inference have not scaled with the product features. - Amazon is stuck and can't significantly improve it using general AI due to costs. The first point is that the speech-to-intent algorithms currently in production are quite basic, likely based on the state of the art from 2013. Initially, there were few features available, so the device was fairly effective at inferring what you wanted from a limited set of possibilities. Over time, Amazon introduced more and more features to choose from, but the devices didn't get any smarter. As a result, mismatches between actual intent and inferred intent became more common, giving the impression that the device is getting dumber. In truth, it’s probably getting somewhat smarter, but not enough to compensate for the increasing complexity over time. The second point is that, clearly, it would be relatively straightforward to create a much smarter Alexa: simply delegate the intent detection to an LLM. However, Amazon can’t do that. By 2019, there were already over 100 million Alexa devices in circulation, and it’s reasonable to assume that number has at least doubled by now. These devices are likely sold at a low margin, and the service is free. If you start requiring GPUs to process millions of daily requests, you would need an enormous, costly infrastructure, which is probably impossible to justify financially—and perhaps even infeasible given the sheer scale of the product. My prediction is that Amazon cannot save the product, and it will die a slow death. It will probably keep working for years but will likely be relegated by most users to a "dumb" device capable of little more than setting alarms, timers, and providing weather reports. If you want Jarvis-like intelligence to control your home automation system, the vision of a local assistant using local AI on an efficient GPU, as presented by HA, is the one with the most chance of succeeding. Beyond the privacy benefits of processing everything locally, the primary reason this approach may become common is that it scales linearly with the installation. If you had a cloud-based solution using Echo-like devices, the problem is that you’d need to scale your cloud infrastructure as you sell more devices. If the service is good, this could become a major challenge. In contrast, if you sell an expensive box with an integrated GPU that does everything locally, you deploy the infrastructure as you sell the product. This eliminates scaling issues and the risks of growing too fast.

freedomben 2y ago
It seems ridiculous to me that this comment is so down voted. It's a thoughtful and interesting comment, and contains a reasonable and even likely explanation for what we've seen, once one puts aside the bottom that Amazon is just evil, which isn't a useful way to think of you truly want to understand the world and motivations. I'm guessing people reflexively down vote because they hate Amazon and it could read like a defense. I hate Amazon too, but emotional voting is unbecoming of HN. If you want emotional voting reddit is available and enormous.
- imiric 2y ago
  I didn't downvote it, but claiming that Echo/Alexa are behind because of financial reasons is misguided at best. Amazon is one of the richest companies on the planet, with vast datacenters that power large parts of the internet. If they wanted to improve their AI products they certainly have the resources to do so.
  - thanksgiving 2y ago
    How do you justify to your manager to spend (and more importantly commit to spending for a long time) hundreds of millions of dollars in aws resources every year? Sure, you already have the hardware but that's a different org, right? You can't expect them to give you those resources for free. Also, voice needs to be instant. You can't say 'Well, the AWS instances are currently expensive. Try again when my spot prices are lower." I am sure you know this but maybe some don't know that basically only the hot word detection is on device. It needs to be connected to the Internet for basically everything else. It already costs Amazon.com some money to run this infrastructure. What we are asking will cost more and you can't really charge the users more. I personally would definitely not sign up for a paid subscription to use Amazon Alexa.
  - baq 2y ago
    Alexa is probably a cool billion under or something. They never figured out how to make money with it.
  - 2y ago

IgorPartola 2y ago

That’s interesting because I have a bunch of Echos of various types in my house and my timers and answers are instant. Is it possible your internet connection is wonky or you have a slow DNS server or congested Wi-Fi? I don’t have the absolute newest devices but the one in my bedroom is the very original Echo that I got during their preview stage, the one in my kitchen is the Echo Show 7” and I have a bunch of puck ones and spherical ones (don’t remember the generations) around the house. One did die at one point after years of use and got replaced but it was in my kids room so I suspect it was subject to some abuse.

creeble 2y ago
I too get pretty consistent response and answers from Alexa these days. There has been some vague decline in the quality of answers (I think sometime back they removed the ability to ask for Wikipedia data), but have no trouble with timers and the few linked wemo switches I have. I’m also the author of an Alexa skill for a music player (basic “transport” control mostly) that i use every day, and it still works the same as it always did. Occasionally I’ll get some freakout answer or abject failure to reply, but it’s fairly rare. I did notice it was down for a whole weekend once; that’s surely related to staffing or priorities.

mrweasel 2y ago

Amazon also fired a large number of people from the Alexa team last year. I don't really think Alexa is a major priority for Amazon at this point. I don't blame them, sure there are millions of devices out there, but some people might own five device. So there aren't as many users as there are devices and they aren't making them any money once bought, not like the Kindle. Frankly I know shockingly few people who uses Siri/Alexa/Google Assistant/Bixby. It's not that voice assistants don't have a use, be it is a much much small use case than initially envisioned and there's no longer the money to found the development, the funds went into blockchain and LLMs. Partly the decline is because it's not as natural an interface as we expected, secondly: to be actually useful, the assistants need access to control things that we may not be comfortable with, or which may pose a liability to the manufacturers.