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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Amazon may want to tread carefully here.

Previously their business model was simply to create a fast-lane into Amazon ordering (e.g. "Alexa order me some toilet paper"), but if what the article says is true they're going to ruin normal searching by only giving you product results (Q: "alexa how do I remove a wine stain?" A: "buy Dr. Bubbles Super cleaner"). If Echo is going to give me bad results for questions I'd just stop using it for that.

I'll use whatever personal assistant gives me the highest quality results. If your business model inherently degrades the quality, then your business model is self-destructive.

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> I'll use whatever personal assistant gives me the highest quality results.

Ultimately this is the problem. They don't have to be good, they just have to be less shitty than their competition and the major players are making their money on ads.

To put it another way, their goal is to be the scum floating on the puddle of diarrhea.

That's the goal of most companies in competitive markets, yes.

>I'll use whatever personal assistant gives me the highest quality results

most likely all these assistants will give you the "sponsored" results first. The sponsored products always appear before highest rating ones whenever I do a search on Amazon, Google, etc.

I doubt they'll be that straight forward.

"Oil stains are better cleaned by treating the stain with vinegar and, after a few minutes, using an specialized local cleaner. Would you like to by one? I will arrive in 1 hour."

"Ok alexa"

"Would you like Dr Bubbles Super Cleaner, for 5$?"

"Sure"

Anyway, I'm sure they can include shitty advertising without diminishing the quality of the results in a way that normal, non-privacy-aware people will care about.

I don't think their strategy of sell em cheap and get a echo into every home will actually save them here as the barrier to switching to a competitor is very low. Coupled with the fact that I get the impression that no one uses their echo for anything other than asking about the weather.

That and you can have multiple timers running. When cooking I use that. When leaving the house, I ask the weather for the day. When planning a weekend trip, I get the weather a for the weekend at where ever.

Barrier to buying a different device is low, but barrier to switching platforms is high. It seems like most people would rather deal with sub-par results than change their daily habits by even a little bit.

Agreed. I imagine most people wouldn't buy things through a voice interface literally sight unseen.

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