Do they sell the devices at a profit?
Does usage of the devices lead to increased sales on Amazon.com? Are those sales that wouldn't have taken place on the app/website otherwise?
Eventually people will say "Alexa buy my groceries"
Alexa will buy from the highest bidder
But for what it's worth, I think there's a conflict of interest here. No one is going to believe that Amazon won't prioritize Fresh or Whole Foods for these orders - even if they don't.
If I tell Alexa to order ketchup, who knows what brand I'll get or what size? It's possible I might end up with banana ketchup or even mayonnaise given how poorly Amazon's search functions work.
No reason why Amazon can't do something similar. They only need it to be "good enough" that people start getting used to not always needing to ask for it to list what is in the upcoming order.
That seems reasonable. Customers can order directly through the device ("Alexa, order some toilet paper"), that's low friction and lets Amazon rank options to their benefit. Plus regularly using Alexa keeps Amazon primed (no pun intended) in the customer's mind so next time they go online shopping they default to Amazon. Once you're using Alexa, there's an Apple effect encouraging adoption of other Amazon products through ease of use (Amazon Music, FireTV, Audible, etc). Amazon is also monetizing their products with ads, I'm sure that's part of the Alexa strategy as well.
Remains to be seen whether there is a "pull back" from smart devices that impacts the play. I was an early adopter of Alexa... at this point no one in my technical circle has proprietary "smart" home automation devices anymore, and the non-tech folks at best use Alexa to search in the Amazon app (mainly because they struggle with phone keyboards)
What are they using now, if you don't mind me asking?
This might get them in trouble eventually.
Yes. We have a few Alexa's and it's helpful to reorder commodities with your voice as you run out of that item (batteries, tape, printer paper, etc). I just add them to my cart and check the price later, but I like it because I'll likely forget to reorder some of those things if I don't do it right away.
Apple and Samsung own our pockets with their devices (and associated platforms), Amazon wants to own the spaces where our phone isn't always close by or easy to use (mostly home and car).
I'd imagine like any other new product, they're taking a risk and hoping the product takes off with higher adoption so they can earn more. The bet on Alexa always seemed to be that people wanted a hands-off, voice powered way to interact with the internet, and perhaps they could charge for skills (creating their own 'app store') at some point, or earn more on selling products on Amazon because people would enjoy the convenience of just asking their device to buy more detergent or whatever. Not sure I ever really got the premise here, because it was always quite easy to order stuff on my computer or phone.
Anyway, I don't work at Amazon so I'm not sure if I'm mistaken about what the idea was. I imagine only some people close to that division would really know.
(I say "was" because they recently rolled part of it out as a Prime benefit a couple of weeks ago, but I can't figure out the exact difference between unlimited and what's included in Prime [and don't care enough to chase it down], but they are still offering a $9/mo unlimited offering, so there must be some difference.)
A massive limitation for some people, but it fits my usage.
It was perfect timing for me. Google just massively raised their prices for Youtube family so I was looking for alternatives.
You can only play in shuffle mode.
"Alexa, put that on my shopping list" directs spending to Amazon in lieu of whatever the local alternative would have been.
The Echo devices are way way too dumb. The user's Cloud account needs app-accessible storage.
Their actual purpose(s) will be emergent and are still being discovered.
The devices listen for their wake word before ever transmitting data to the cloud. (This is also because the sheer amount of bandwidth needed for always-on would be un-economical even for Amazon).
No clear idea what that data is, though. There's at least a small chance it isn't benign.
As/when it's put on my institution's open repository I'll post a link. Might be a few weeks though.
Hell, don't even send the sound, just send a weekly report of events.
While absence is hard to prove, an intentional or unintentional data collection beyond what is stated in their policies is highly unlikely.