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The thing that people seem to have forgotten is that the companies that previously attempted to monetize data center based voice assistants lost massive amounts

The thing that people seem to have forgotten is that the companies that previously attempted to monetize data center based voice assistants lost massive amounts of money. > Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year... “Alexa was getting a billion interactions a week, but most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather.” Those questions aren’t monetizable. Google expressed basically identical problems with the Google Assistant business model last month. There’s an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make, and all of Google’s attempts to monetize assistants with display ads and company partnerships haven’t worked. With the product sucking up server time and being a big money loser, Google responded just like Amazon by cutting resources to the division. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co... Moving to using much more resource intensive models is only going to jack up the datacenter costs.

Animats 11mo ago
> Those questions aren’t monetizable. ... There’s an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make. There lies the problem. Worse, someone may solve it in the wrong way: I'll turn on the light in a minute, but first, a word from our sponsor... Technically, this will eventually be solved by some hierarchical system. The main problem is developing systems with enough "I don't know" capability to decide when to pass a question to a bigger system. LLMs still aren't good at that, and the ones that are require substantial resources. What the world needs is a good $5 LLM that knows when to ask for help. Useful Douglas Adams reference: [1] [1] http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=135 http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=135
- hightrix 11mo ago
  This type of response has been given by Alexa from an echo device in my house. I asked, “play x on y”, the response was something like “ok, but first check out this new…”. I immediately unplugged that device and all other Alexa enabled devices in the house. We have not used it since. This is the monetization wall they have to figure out how to break through. The first inkling of advertising is immediate turn off and destroy, for me.
  - mapontosevenths 11mo ago
    Even worse than ads, mine keeps trying to jam "News" down my throat. I keep disabling the news feeds on all my devices and they kept re-enabling against my wishes. Every now and then I'll say something to Alexa and she'll just start informing me about how awful everything is, or the echo show in the kitchen will stop displaying the weather in favor of some horrific news story. Me: "Alexa, is cheese safe for dogs?" Alexa: "Today, prominent politician Nosferatu was accused by the opposition of baby-cannibal sex trafficking. Nosferatu says that these charges are baseless as global warming will certainly kill everyone in painful ways by next Tuesday at exactly 3pm. In further news, Amazon has added more advertisements to this device for only a small additional charge..." If I wanted to feel like crap every time I go to the kitchen I'd put a scale in there. /s
- jmye 11mo ago
  > LLMs still aren't good at that I find this a really interesting observation. I feel like 3-4 trivial ways of doing it come to mind, which is sort of my signal that I’m way out of my depth (and that anything I’ve thought of is dumb or wrong for various reasons). Is there anything you’d recommend reading to better understand why this is true?
  - throwaway290 11mo ago
    You are asking why someone don't want to ship a tool that obviously doesn't work? Surely it's always better/more profitable to ship a tool that at least seems to work
    - fn-mote 11mo ago
      GP means they aren't good at knowing when they are wrong and should spend more compute on the problem. I would say the current generation of LLMs that "think harder" when you tell them their first response is wrong is a training grounds for knowing to think harder without being told, but I don't know the obstacles.
      - throwaway290 11mo ago
        Are you suggesting that when you tell it "think harder" it does something like "pass a question to a bigger system"? I have doubts... It would be gated behind more expensive plan if so
    - jmye 11mo ago
      No? I’m interested in why LLMs are bad at knowing when they don’t know the answer, and why that’s a particularly difficult problem to solve.
      - throwaway290 11mo ago
        Because people make them and people make them for profit. incentives make the product what it is. an LLM just needs to return something that is good enough for average person confidently to make money. if an LLM said "I don't know" more often it would make less money. because for the user this is means the thing they pay for failed at its job.
Mistletoe 11mo ago
I think of my Alexa often when I think about AI and how Amazon, of all people, couldn't monetize it. What hope do LLM providers have? Alexa is in rooms all around my house and has gotten amazing at answering questions, setting timers, telling me the weather, etc., but would I ever pay a subscription for it? Absolutely not. I wouldn't even have bought the hardware except that it was a loss leader and was like $20. I wouldn't have even paid $100 for it. Our whole economy is mortgaged on this?
- gedy 11mo ago
  This is probably why there’s so much attention on LLM powered coding tools, as it’s one of the few use cases that seem like people would actually pay for it. Ironically mostly developers, who are being marketed as being replaced by AI.
  - dangus 11mo ago
    It's also a use case where you already have a user of above-average intelligence who is there correcting hallucinations and mistakes, and is mostly using the technology to speed up boilerplate. This just doesn't translate to other job types super well, at least, so far.
    - player1234 10mo ago
      [dead]
- delecti 11mo ago
  I'm extremely bearish on AI, but I'm not sure I agree with the framing "not even Amazon could..." All of the advertising around Alexa focused on the simple narrow use cases that people now use it for, and I'm inclined to assume that advertising is part of it. I think another part is probably that voice is really just not that fantastic of an interface for any other kind of interactions. I don't find it surprising that OpenAI's whole framing around ChatGPT, of it being a text-based chat window (as are the other LLMs), is where most of the use seems to happen. I like it best when Alexa acts as a terse butler ("turn on the lights" "done"), not a chatty engaging conversationalist.
QuercusMax 11mo ago
It doesn't help that Google also keeps breaking everything with the home voice assistants, and this has been true for ages and ages. I only have a single internet-enabled light in my house (that I got for free), and 90% of the time when I ask the Assistant to turn on the light, it says "Which one?". Then I tell it "the only one that exists in my house", and it says "OK" and turns it on. Getting it to actually play the right song is on the right set of speakers is also nearly impossible, but I can do it no problem with the UI on my phone. I don't fear a future where computers can do every task better than us: I fear a future where we have brain-damaged robots annoy the hell out of me because someone was too lazy to do anything besides throw an LLM at things.
- Terr_ 11mo ago
  I had an annoying few weeks where, after years of working properly, Google assistant started misinterpreting "navigate home" as "navigate to the nearest Home Depot™".
  - PunchyHamster 11mo ago
    not really limited to their AI products; Android just sometimes randomly decides that pressing play on BT receiver in my car should totally start playing the song directly from my phone instead of the BT it connected to
  - calvinmorrison 11mo ago
    "Alexa Play SpongeBob on youtube" is met with a sabrina carpenter hit every time. no idea why Alternative it is hit with "Would you like Spongebob, Spongebob Sponge on the Run, the spongebob squarepants movie, or Bob Espanja Pantalones Cuadrados
  - QuercusMax 11mo ago
    I really wonder if Google has any reasonable QA people still working on this stuff.
    - bdangubic 11mo ago
slg 11mo ago
I feel like you're getting at something different here, but my conclusion is that maybe the problem is the approach of wanting to monetize each interaction. Almost every company today wants their primary business model to be as a service provider selling you some monthly or yearly subscription when most consumers just want to buy something and have it work. That has always been Apple's model. Sure, they'll sell you services if need be, iCloud, AppleCare, or the various pieces of Apple One, but those all serve as complements to their devices. There's no big push to get Android users to sign up for Apple Music for example. Apple isn't in the market of collecting your data and selling it. They aren't in the market of pushing you to pick brand X toilet paper over brand Y. They are in the market of selling you devices and so they build AI systems to make the devices they sell more attractive products. It isn't that Apple has some ideologically or technically better approach, they just have a business model that happens to align more with the typical consumers' wants and needs.
- dangus 11mo ago
  I know you're saying that Apple's business model is selling devices but it's not like they aren't a services juggernaut. Where I think you are ultimately correct is that some companies seem to just assume that 100% of interactions can be monetized, and they really can't. You need to deliver value that matches the money paid or the ad viewed. I think Apple has generally been decent at recognizing the overall sustainability of certain business models. They've been around long enough to know that most loss-leading businesses never work out. If you can't make a profit from day one what's the point of being in business?
  - slg 11mo ago
    >it's not like they aren't a services juggernaut. It depends. I guess you can argue this is true purely from scale. However, we should also keep in mind there are a lot of different things that Apple and tech companies in general put under "services". So even when you see a big number under "Service Revenue" on some financial report, we should recognize that most of that was from taking a cut of some other transaction happening on their devices. Relative to the rest of their business, they don't make much from monthly/yearly subscriptions or monetizing their customers' searches/interactions. They instead serve as a middleman on purchase of apps, music, movies, TV, and now even financial transactions made with Apple Card/Pay/Cash. And in that way, they are a service company in the same way that any brick and mortar store is a service company.
yunwal 11mo ago
> There’s an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make In my experience none of these voice assistance are accurate enough to trust with my money
parliament32 11mo ago
> With the product sucking up server time This is the part that hasn't made much sense to me. Maybe just.. have a better product? As you quoted above, "most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather." Why does any of this need to consume provider resources? Could a weather or music command not just be.. a direct API call from the device to a weather service / Spotify / whatever? Why does everything need to be shipped to Google/Amazon HQ?
- danaris 11mo ago
  From what I can tell, only Apple even wants to try doing any of the processing on-device. Including parsing the speech. (This may be out-of-date at this point, but I haven't heard of Amazon or Google doing on-device processing for Alexa or Assistant.) So there's no way for them to do anything without sending it off to the datacenter.
  - delecti 11mo ago
    Alexa actually had the option to process all requests locally (on at least some hardware) for the first ~10 years, from launch until earlier this year. The stated reason for removing the feature was generative AI.
  - miyoji 11mo ago
    > (This may be out-of-date at this point, but I haven't heard of Amazon or Google doing on-device processing for Alexa or Assistant.) It was out of date 6 years ago. "This breakthrough enabled us to create a next generation Assistant that processes speech on-device at nearly zero latency, with transcription that happens in real-time, even when you have no network connection." - Google, 2019 https://blog.google/products/assistant/next-generation-google-assistant-io/ https://blog.google/products/assistant/next-generation-googl...
  - foobiekr 11mo ago
    It's an obvious cost optimization. Make the consumer directly cover the cost of inference and idle inference hardware.
ghaff 11mo ago
Voice assistants that were at the level of a fairly mediocre internet-connected human assistant might be vaguely useful. But they're not. So even if many of us have one or two in our houses or sometimes lean on them for navigation in our cars we mostly don't use them much. Amazon at one point was going to have a big facility in Boston as I recall focused on Alexa. It's just an uninteresting product that, if it were to go away tomorrow I wouldn't much notice. And I certainly wouldn't pay an incremental subscription for.
jjtheblunt 11mo ago
nuance seems to have done ok with datacenter based voice assistants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuance_Communications#Acquisition_by_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuance_Communications#Acquisit...
jordanb 11mo ago
The assistant thing really shows the lie behind most of the "big data" economy. 1) They thought an assistant would be able to operate as an "agent" (heh) that would make purchasing decisions to benefit the company. You'd say "Alexa, buy toilet paper" and it would buy it from Amazon. Except it turns out people don't want their computer buying things for them. 2) They thought that an assistant listening to everything would make for better targeted ads. But this doesn't seem to be the case, or the increased targeting doesn't result in enough value to justify the expense. A customer with the agent doesn't seem to be particularly more valuable than one without. I think that this AI stuff and LLMs in particular is an excuse, to some extent, to justify the massive investment already made in big data architecture. At least they can say we needed all this data to train an LLM! I've noticed a similar pivot towards military/policing: if this data isn't sufficiently valuable for advertising maybe it's valuable to the police state.
- acdha 11mo ago
  > Except it turns out people don't want their computer buying things for them. I think this also hits an interesting problem with confidence: if you could trust the service to buy what you’d buy and get a good price you’d probably use it more but it only saves a couple of seconds in the easy case (e.g. Amazon reorders are already easy) and for anything less clear cut people rightly worry about getting a mistake or rip-off. That puts the bar really high because a voice interface sucks for more complex product comparisons and they have a very short window to give a high-quality response before most people give up and use their phone/computer instead. That also constrains the most obvious revenue sources because any kind of pay for placement is going to inspire strong negative reactions.
- onetokeoverthe 11mo ago
  [dead]
overfeed 11mo ago
Some features are not meant to be revenue sources. I'd lump assistive technology and AI assistants into the category of things that elevate the usefulness of one's ecosystem, even when not directly monetizable. Edit: IMO Apple is under-investing in Siri for that role.
- robot_jesus 11mo ago
  Steve Jobs famously said, "If you do the right things on the top line, the bottom line will follow.” Paraphrased: if you do things with the explicit goal to optimize revenue, it harms your business success. If you do things that optimize user experience and delight customers, it will provide more value long-term. Voice assistants are in that latter camp, I believe. (And I think of this quote constantly as Tim Cook crams more ads into the ecosystem)
  - throwaway290 10mo ago
    What ads did Cook cram in the ecosystem? The ones in app store?
blackoil 11mo ago
The difference is previous version of alexa wasn't good enough to pay for it. Now it is good enough that millions of users are paying $10-100 for these services.
veunes 11mo ago
That is exactly why Apple's on-device strategy is the only economically viable one. If every Siri request cost $0.01 for cloud inference, Apple would go bankrupt in a month. But if inference happens on the Neural Engine on the user's phone, the cost to Apple is zero (well, aside from R&D). This solves the problem of unmonetizable requests like "set a timer," which killed Alexa's economics
- bayindirh 11mo ago
  On top of it, on-device models increase response times and can be really private if the developer decides.
- lopis 11mo ago
  The greed to lock customers in early on for cheap or free, in hopes to force them on a subscription, absolutely ruined the previous era os assistants. It could have been great with offline inference and foster competition. Instead we got mediocre assistants, thst got worse each year.
Tagbert 11mo ago
Much of the cost of Alexa wasn't the data center costs, as Alexa was not, until recently, an AI. Amazon lost tons of money selling cheap Echo speakers at below cost expecting people would use Alexa on those to buy things. Turns out, people don't like to buy things by yelling at a speaker.
- mjhay 11mo ago
  It is amazing sometimes how executives can check common sense at the door, and act like consumers are some separate species from themselves.
quxbar 11mo ago
My mother always enjoyed playing Jeopardy! on alexa, it was a novel format and everybody could participate while sitting around and chatting. She happily would have paid for it, even the dreaded monthly subscription, but it was neglected. The service started being buggy (lagging, repeatedly restarting the day's question series) and now they've moved on. If anyone knows of an open-source alternative I could stitch together, I am all ears!

Animats 11mo ago

> Those questions aren’t monetizable. ... There’s an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make. There lies the problem. Worse, someone may solve it in the wrong way: I'll turn on the light in a minute, but first, a word from our sponsor... Technically, this will eventually be solved by some hierarchical system. The main problem is developing systems with enough "I don't know" capability to decide when to pass a question to a bigger system. LLMs still aren't good at that, and the ones that are require substantial resources. What the world needs is a good $5 LLM that knows when to ask for help. Useful Douglas Adams reference: [1] [1] http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=135 http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=135

hightrix 11mo ago
This type of response has been given by Alexa from an echo device in my house. I asked, “play x on y”, the response was something like “ok, but first check out this new…”. I immediately unplugged that device and all other Alexa enabled devices in the house. We have not used it since. This is the monetization wall they have to figure out how to break through. The first inkling of advertising is immediate turn off and destroy, for me.
- mapontosevenths 11mo ago
  Even worse than ads, mine keeps trying to jam "News" down my throat. I keep disabling the news feeds on all my devices and they kept re-enabling against my wishes. Every now and then I'll say something to Alexa and she'll just start informing me about how awful everything is, or the echo show in the kitchen will stop displaying the weather in favor of some horrific news story. Me: "Alexa, is cheese safe for dogs?" Alexa: "Today, prominent politician Nosferatu was accused by the opposition of baby-cannibal sex trafficking. Nosferatu says that these charges are baseless as global warming will certainly kill everyone in painful ways by next Tuesday at exactly 3pm. In further news, Amazon has added more advertisements to this device for only a small additional charge..." If I wanted to feel like crap every time I go to the kitchen I'd put a scale in there. /s
jmye 11mo ago
> LLMs still aren't good at that I find this a really interesting observation. I feel like 3-4 trivial ways of doing it come to mind, which is sort of my signal that I’m way out of my depth (and that anything I’ve thought of is dumb or wrong for various reasons). Is there anything you’d recommend reading to better understand why this is true?
- throwaway290 11mo ago
  You are asking why someone don't want to ship a tool that obviously doesn't work? Surely it's always better/more profitable to ship a tool that at least seems to work
  - fn-mote 11mo ago
    GP means they aren't good at knowing when they are wrong and should spend more compute on the problem. I would say the current generation of LLMs that "think harder" when you tell them their first response is wrong is a training grounds for knowing to think harder without being told, but I don't know the obstacles.
    - throwaway290 11mo ago
      Are you suggesting that when you tell it "think harder" it does something like "pass a question to a bigger system"? I have doubts... It would be gated behind more expensive plan if so
  - jmye 11mo ago
    No? I’m interested in why LLMs are bad at knowing when they don’t know the answer, and why that’s a particularly difficult problem to solve.
    - throwaway290 11mo ago
      Because people make them and people make them for profit. incentives make the product what it is. an LLM just needs to return something that is good enough for average person confidently to make money. if an LLM said "I don't know" more often it would make less money. because for the user this is means the thing they pay for failed at its job.

Mistletoe 11mo ago

I think of my Alexa often when I think about AI and how Amazon, of all people, couldn't monetize it. What hope do LLM providers have? Alexa is in rooms all around my house and has gotten amazing at answering questions, setting timers, telling me the weather, etc., but would I ever pay a subscription for it? Absolutely not. I wouldn't even have bought the hardware except that it was a loss leader and was like $20. I wouldn't have even paid $100 for it. Our whole economy is mortgaged on this?

gedy 11mo ago
This is probably why there’s so much attention on LLM powered coding tools, as it’s one of the few use cases that seem like people would actually pay for it. Ironically mostly developers, who are being marketed as being replaced by AI.
- dangus 11mo ago
  It's also a use case where you already have a user of above-average intelligence who is there correcting hallucinations and mistakes, and is mostly using the technology to speed up boilerplate. This just doesn't translate to other job types super well, at least, so far.
  - player1234 10mo ago
    [dead]
delecti 11mo ago
I'm extremely bearish on AI, but I'm not sure I agree with the framing "not even Amazon could..." All of the advertising around Alexa focused on the simple narrow use cases that people now use it for, and I'm inclined to assume that advertising is part of it. I think another part is probably that voice is really just not that fantastic of an interface for any other kind of interactions. I don't find it surprising that OpenAI's whole framing around ChatGPT, of it being a text-based chat window (as are the other LLMs), is where most of the use seems to happen. I like it best when Alexa acts as a terse butler ("turn on the lights" "done"), not a chatty engaging conversationalist.

QuercusMax 11mo ago

It doesn't help that Google also keeps breaking everything with the home voice assistants, and this has been true for ages and ages. I only have a single internet-enabled light in my house (that I got for free), and 90% of the time when I ask the Assistant to turn on the light, it says "Which one?". Then I tell it "the only one that exists in my house", and it says "OK" and turns it on. Getting it to actually play the right song is on the right set of speakers is also nearly impossible, but I can do it no problem with the UI on my phone. I don't fear a future where computers can do every task better than us: I fear a future where we have brain-damaged robots annoy the hell out of me because someone was too lazy to do anything besides throw an LLM at things.

Terr_ 11mo ago
I had an annoying few weeks where, after years of working properly, Google assistant started misinterpreting "navigate home" as "navigate to the nearest Home Depot™".
- PunchyHamster 11mo ago
  not really limited to their AI products; Android just sometimes randomly decides that pressing play on BT receiver in my car should totally start playing the song directly from my phone instead of the BT it connected to
- calvinmorrison 11mo ago
  "Alexa Play SpongeBob on youtube" is met with a sabrina carpenter hit every time. no idea why Alternative it is hit with "Would you like Spongebob, Spongebob Sponge on the Run, the spongebob squarepants movie, or Bob Espanja Pantalones Cuadrados
- QuercusMax 11mo ago
  I really wonder if Google has any reasonable QA people still working on this stuff.
  - bdangubic 11mo ago

slg 11mo ago

I feel like you're getting at something different here, but my conclusion is that maybe the problem is the approach of wanting to monetize each interaction. Almost every company today wants their primary business model to be as a service provider selling you some monthly or yearly subscription when most consumers just want to buy something and have it work. That has always been Apple's model. Sure, they'll sell you services if need be, iCloud, AppleCare, or the various pieces of Apple One, but those all serve as complements to their devices. There's no big push to get Android users to sign up for Apple Music for example. Apple isn't in the market of collecting your data and selling it. They aren't in the market of pushing you to pick brand X toilet paper over brand Y. They are in the market of selling you devices and so they build AI systems to make the devices they sell more attractive products. It isn't that Apple has some ideologically or technically better approach, they just have a business model that happens to align more with the typical consumers' wants and needs.

dangus 11mo ago
I know you're saying that Apple's business model is selling devices but it's not like they aren't a services juggernaut. Where I think you are ultimately correct is that some companies seem to just assume that 100% of interactions can be monetized, and they really can't. You need to deliver value that matches the money paid or the ad viewed. I think Apple has generally been decent at recognizing the overall sustainability of certain business models. They've been around long enough to know that most loss-leading businesses never work out. If you can't make a profit from day one what's the point of being in business?
- slg 11mo ago
  >it's not like they aren't a services juggernaut. It depends. I guess you can argue this is true purely from scale. However, we should also keep in mind there are a lot of different things that Apple and tech companies in general put under "services". So even when you see a big number under "Service Revenue" on some financial report, we should recognize that most of that was from taking a cut of some other transaction happening on their devices. Relative to the rest of their business, they don't make much from monthly/yearly subscriptions or monetizing their customers' searches/interactions. They instead serve as a middleman on purchase of apps, music, movies, TV, and now even financial transactions made with Apple Card/Pay/Cash. And in that way, they are a service company in the same way that any brick and mortar store is a service company.

yunwal 11mo ago

> There’s an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make In my experience none of these voice assistance are accurate enough to trust with my money

parliament32 11mo ago

> With the product sucking up server time This is the part that hasn't made much sense to me. Maybe just.. have a better product? As you quoted above, "most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather." Why does any of this need to consume provider resources? Could a weather or music command not just be.. a direct API call from the device to a weather service / Spotify / whatever? Why does everything need to be shipped to Google/Amazon HQ?

danaris 11mo ago
From what I can tell, only Apple even wants to try doing any of the processing on-device. Including parsing the speech. (This may be out-of-date at this point, but I haven't heard of Amazon or Google doing on-device processing for Alexa or Assistant.) So there's no way for them to do anything without sending it off to the datacenter.
- delecti 11mo ago
  Alexa actually had the option to process all requests locally (on at least some hardware) for the first ~10 years, from launch until earlier this year. The stated reason for removing the feature was generative AI.
- miyoji 11mo ago
  > (This may be out-of-date at this point, but I haven't heard of Amazon or Google doing on-device processing for Alexa or Assistant.) It was out of date 6 years ago. "This breakthrough enabled us to create a next generation Assistant that processes speech on-device at nearly zero latency, with transcription that happens in real-time, even when you have no network connection." - Google, 2019 https://blog.google/products/assistant/next-generation-google-assistant-io/ https://blog.google/products/assistant/next-generation-googl...
- foobiekr 11mo ago
  It's an obvious cost optimization. Make the consumer directly cover the cost of inference and idle inference hardware.

ghaff 11mo ago

Voice assistants that were at the level of a fairly mediocre internet-connected human assistant might be vaguely useful. But they're not. So even if many of us have one or two in our houses or sometimes lean on them for navigation in our cars we mostly don't use them much. Amazon at one point was going to have a big facility in Boston as I recall focused on Alexa. It's just an uninteresting product that, if it were to go away tomorrow I wouldn't much notice. And I certainly wouldn't pay an incremental subscription for.

jjtheblunt 11mo ago

nuance seems to have done ok with datacenter based voice assistants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuance_Communications#Acquisition_by_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuance_Communications#Acquisit...

jordanb 11mo ago

The assistant thing really shows the lie behind most of the "big data" economy. 1) They thought an assistant would be able to operate as an "agent" (heh) that would make purchasing decisions to benefit the company. You'd say "Alexa, buy toilet paper" and it would buy it from Amazon. Except it turns out people don't want their computer buying things for them. 2) They thought that an assistant listening to everything would make for better targeted ads. But this doesn't seem to be the case, or the increased targeting doesn't result in enough value to justify the expense. A customer with the agent doesn't seem to be particularly more valuable than one without. I think that this AI stuff and LLMs in particular is an excuse, to some extent, to justify the massive investment already made in big data architecture. At least they can say we needed all this data to train an LLM! I've noticed a similar pivot towards military/policing: if this data isn't sufficiently valuable for advertising maybe it's valuable to the police state.

acdha 11mo ago
> Except it turns out people don't want their computer buying things for them. I think this also hits an interesting problem with confidence: if you could trust the service to buy what you’d buy and get a good price you’d probably use it more but it only saves a couple of seconds in the easy case (e.g. Amazon reorders are already easy) and for anything less clear cut people rightly worry about getting a mistake or rip-off. That puts the bar really high because a voice interface sucks for more complex product comparisons and they have a very short window to give a high-quality response before most people give up and use their phone/computer instead. That also constrains the most obvious revenue sources because any kind of pay for placement is going to inspire strong negative reactions.
onetokeoverthe 11mo ago
[dead]

overfeed 11mo ago

Some features are not meant to be revenue sources. I'd lump assistive technology and AI assistants into the category of things that elevate the usefulness of one's ecosystem, even when not directly monetizable. Edit: IMO Apple is under-investing in Siri for that role.

robot_jesus 11mo ago
Steve Jobs famously said, "If you do the right things on the top line, the bottom line will follow.” Paraphrased: if you do things with the explicit goal to optimize revenue, it harms your business success. If you do things that optimize user experience and delight customers, it will provide more value long-term. Voice assistants are in that latter camp, I believe. (And I think of this quote constantly as Tim Cook crams more ads into the ecosystem)
- throwaway290 10mo ago
  What ads did Cook cram in the ecosystem? The ones in app store?

blackoil 11mo ago

The difference is previous version of alexa wasn't good enough to pay for it. Now it is good enough that millions of users are paying $10-100 for these services.

veunes 11mo ago

That is exactly why Apple's on-device strategy is the only economically viable one. If every Siri request cost $0.01 for cloud inference, Apple would go bankrupt in a month. But if inference happens on the Neural Engine on the user's phone, the cost to Apple is zero (well, aside from R&D). This solves the problem of unmonetizable requests like "set a timer," which killed Alexa's economics

bayindirh 11mo ago
On top of it, on-device models increase response times and can be really private if the developer decides.
lopis 11mo ago
The greed to lock customers in early on for cheap or free, in hopes to force them on a subscription, absolutely ruined the previous era os assistants. It could have been great with offline inference and foster competition. Instead we got mediocre assistants, thst got worse each year.

Tagbert 11mo ago

Much of the cost of Alexa wasn't the data center costs, as Alexa was not, until recently, an AI. Amazon lost tons of money selling cheap Echo speakers at below cost expecting people would use Alexa on those to buy things. Turns out, people don't like to buy things by yelling at a speaker.

mjhay 11mo ago
It is amazing sometimes how executives can check common sense at the door, and act like consumers are some separate species from themselves.

quxbar 11mo ago

My mother always enjoyed playing Jeopardy! on alexa, it was a novel format and everybody could participate while sitting around and chatting. She happily would have paid for it, even the dreaded monthly subscription, but it was neglected. The service started being buggy (lagging, repeatedly restarting the day's question series) and now they've moved on. If anyone knows of an open-source alternative I could stitch together, I am all ears!