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Comment by davnicwil | Hacker News Reader

The point about the vast majority of Alexa interactions being trivial and repeated things that aren't monetizable rings true with me.

When I've used one it's been for exactly two useful things: timers while cooking and weather, and one frivilous thing: jokes. It's valuable enough for those things to be honest, given the purchase price, but yeah there is no feasible way to make ongoing revenue from them.

I just can't think of anything else I want to use one for, if I could I probably would have.

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Well, I worked at Alexa in the past. For the jokes you like, there was a team of about 10-12 developers plus 3-4 product managers, and BI infrastructure. They had their own speechlet. This group cost what, $3m/year to Amazon, more or less. From here you can start seeing why Alexa would never be a profitable enterprise.

My fondest memory of Alexa was when its VP, Tom Taylor, came to my site, pulled up a blackboard and started jotting down the math of how much it should make to be profitable. Then, to our astonishment, he solicited the crowd for ideas on how to monetize the platform.

I never understood the appeal of those things. Everybody who own one of those already own a smartphone whith the exact same voice assisted functions.

I think there is something to the idea of a beacon in common rooms rather than a cell phone.

When i'm at home I rarely have my phone with me. If I am in the kitchen and I need a timer initiated it's simply easier for me to speak the command out loud than it is for me to traipse to the next room for the phone.

Now, if the argument is "I don't know why we need so many competing services that do the same thing." , I agree.

I wish that there was an Echo equivalent that just acted as a dumb thin-ware style client connected to my mobile phone via wifi or whatever that was there only to act as a microphone bridge, with all the heavy work being accomplished by the mobile phone.

I use timer buil in into cooker or oven. Not voice activated, but super practical anyway.

Man, and here I am just looking at the wall clock every once in awhile. Honestly if you just stay engaged with the world around you and mindful while you're doing things you develop a strong internal sense of time-passing that makes external crutches unnecessary for most tasks. With a little practice you can get to a similar point with the weather too.

Or, I can set in timer and then go on happily daydreaming or solving puzzles or reading HN. Imo, I win here.

How is an overexpensive electronic waste device an improvement over a simple mechanical timer in your kitchen that will last decades or the builtin timer/programmation of your oven?

I mean if the only use of an amazon echo is having a timer, getting weather forecast and playing music this is a really bad financial, privacy and environmental decision.

Anecdotally, having raced my friend who uses Google Home extensively, it is much faster to set a timer on my Pebble by pushing a few 0-latency buttons than to navigate the verbal protocol demanded by these devices (trigger word, pause, "set a timer for <x>", pause, machine verbally confirms timer before starting it).

(On a laggy Bangle.js the race would swing the other way. Pebble got so much right.)

I like my bangle.js2, but I loved my pebble. If only the bangle had more physical buttons.

I used to change the lights sometimes.

Lights. Music. Fart noises.

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