Amazon Alexa Deemed ‘Colossal Failure’ Following $10B Loss
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
Amazon Alexa Deemed ‘Colossal Failure’ Following $10B Loss - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33757288 - Nov 2022 (59 comments)
Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33700792 - Nov 2022 (361 comments)
Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10B this year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33700160 - Nov 2022 (55 comments)
Amazon's Alexa on Track to Lose $10B This Year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33697469 - Nov 2022 (37 comments)
Amazon Is Gutting Its Voice-Assistant Alexa - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680904 - Nov 2022 (121 comments)
Business Insider: Amazon is gutting its voice-assistant Alexa - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33679791 - Nov 2022 (20 comments)
* Spotify across the apartment due to the seamlessness of Spotify Connect. No complaints about sync or sound quality, works beautifully.
* Audiobooks or radio while unable to control smartphone (bathtub, exercise).
* Quick access to radio stations, news shows (the ones it understands at least :) ).
* Simple automatic routines like a brown noise playlist during sleep or wake up music, or turning the lights off at night.
* Elderly people in my family who don’t understand tech love theirs to request favorite music via Spotify, set kitchen timers, play digital radio, get a morning greeting. It’s an extended kitchen radio for them and in heavy use.
Would not call this a failed product, perhaps they should focus on core functionality, and improve the app (that I fortunately rarely use).
That makes them failed products from a business viewpoint.
Of course, they would become successful from a business viewpoint if they could sell enough of them at (cost + reasonable margin), but the article doesn’t discuss whether that would be possible.
The "colossal failure" in all the recent headlines means "colossal [financial Return-On-Investment] failure" because customers are not shopping with Alexa voice commands.
A lot of consumers do like Alexa and millions have bought them because conveniences like turning on the lights and playing music are desirable -- but those "smart home" type of uses are not increasing revenue for Amazon.
Amazon was betting on more "Alexa, buy AA batteries" (i.e. spend money) instead of just "Alexa, turn on the light". With more sales enabled by Alexa, it would have justified the billions spent on developing the voice recognition infrastructure. In that monetization sense, it's a "colossal failure".
The listening capabilities are probably the most valuable and my grapevine says they're pivoting to buy up audio content (ie Wondery).
I would believe that Whole Foods could pull this off. Or maybe Target, or more generally any store that competently curates their inventory. That’s not Amazon.
> Alexa, buy AA batteries
This lets them shill for whatever gives them the best margin directly, without having to present the user multiple products.
I guess it turns out that people tend to want a bit more control than that. Especially considering that when I tell an SO or friend to buy something I can be confident they'll act in my interest, while I can be fairly confident that Amazon will act in Amazon's interests when told to buy me something.
Their problem is their high expectations to make it a big business. Same way Google kills good products willy-nilly because of unrealistic expectations or inability to spin it off into a self-sustainable project that builds good will with the parent brand.
Whenever Alexa tries to get me to add things to my cart or search products I roll my eyes (it’s never intrusive or annoying, they know better) so I can see why it might not tie in well with their primary business or any added revenue streams.
But they can make money selling the devices or on the App Store - they totally suck at promoting apps and educating users on new usecases. Especially if their AI isn’t going to improve like it hasn’t in the 5 years I’ve used it (if they are investing in the AI side heavily I haven’t seen the ROI).
The fact my US-made Rainbow Echo Dot stopped working entirely when moved overseas is a testament to the Alexa service team's pernicious gatekeeper mentality. Don't even get me started on the baffling inconsistencies in behaviour exhibited by Alexa when embedded e.g. trying to control my Sonos kit.
I am especially dissatisfied having been the recipient of a pre-production first-generation Echo courtesy of a visiting BDM whilst managing an AWS team in Melbourne. Super excited at the time, super disappointed now.
Perhaps I should've paid more heed to a key early warning of a restricted and rather parochial outlook: in the first year or so of operation it was impossible to register an Echo with a service address outside of the USA, and I could only set an overseas timezone by writing my own configuration front-end. Even for a MVP, in hindsight, that was a red flag.
That quote in the article, "Alexa is a colossal failure of imagination", sums up my feeling (I am not the former employee quoted).
Those are the two simple things Alexa is good at. Then I also pay for Amazon Music. I don't know if the Amazon profits counts in profit from Amazon Music but without Alexa I would not be be paying for Amazon Music .
Agreed, I bashed the AI R&D but really I should be bashing the UX/dev environment. Adding new workflows and finding new apps should be 10x easier. Instead of asking me to add things to a cart they should recommend new ways to use the product.
Amazon has totally undersold the capabilities of their devices to users.
Idk if google is any better. I use Amazon because I love the firestick and I’m a big Audible user.
Indeed it is. What Alexa can do today was science fiction 20 years ago. I can say "Alexa, order Earl Grey tea" and a package of Earl Grey tea will show up on my front door step tommorow. Yeah, its slower than a Star Trek replicator but essentially the same thing.
What sold me was hearing about my 9yr old niece asking Alexa random questions at 1am because she couldn’t sleep and then asking for rain sounds. And how everyone in the family knows she’s the weather expert because she asks Alexa the weather every morning.
For Siri I just use it to set alarms. It’s incredible how much money has been wasted on “digital assistants”.
Maybe it doesn't have to cost 10B but it looks like there were in fact a lot of costs.
I worked with a guy that switched team, coming from an Alexa team dedicated to supporting jokes on the devices. It was dozens of people dedicated to just that, and that was a SMALL thing.
10B is absolutely not a surprising number.
10B would then pay for 5000 employees for 8 years (echo was released in 2004). My impression is that there were more than 5000 people working on Alexa between devs, QA, PMs, TPMs, managers, designers, etc, so I'm not surprised by $10B at all. In fact, it seems low after doing the calculation above, but people do switch projects or are shared so maybe it just seemed like that to me.
There have been device sales and as such revenue.
I recall, when they initially appeared on the market, cries of how they would be used to spy on us and collect vast amounts of personal data to sell.
I take these announcements of “colossal failure” as sign those fears were overblown.
It was a funny prank but I was astonished to see that it wouldn't do any sort of voice detection and if I said "buy items in cart" I'm sure it would have done it without any biometric confirmation that I actually was who I said I was.
For a new technology to succeed it needs to be better than what already exists. Voice is absolutely not that. Compared to a keyboard or a GUI it is clumsy, in-precise and cumbersome. It is not convenient in a huge number of situations, for instance in places where other people are around, like offices or open spaces, or noisy conditions. It presents privacy issues that tactile interfaces do not.
In most cases voice acts as an additional input method to one that already exists, and as such adds cognitive load on the user, they now have two very different ways of achieving a given task, so there is an added initial choice, plus then having to think about how to achieve the task this way. A lot of tasks will not be possible via voice for a long time, so there is that added decision as well, can I even do this with voice.
People will say, ah but that’s not a problem with voice, it’s due to the immaturity of language processing. When we can more accurately understand what the user wants, voice will become a viable interface. There is something to that, but we are a long, long way from there, and it still doesn’t address a lot of the issues I raised above.
Apple are often chided as being way behind in voice. I’m beginning to think that they realised these problems a long time ago, and have decided not to put the effort in, apart from presenting it as an accessibility feature.
I think smart assistants could be a useful gadget eventually, but alas this isn’t it.
Among the challenges, as with Google Glass, is that the target audience that wants to live in a Jetsons house awash in gadgets is really not that great.
You do your job and are frustrated by tech all day.
Do you really want to come home and fight to get this Monkey Fighting puck to understand you? Why, no: no, you do not.
I couldn't see using an echo when I had my phone/pc that does everything.
Now an entry into the home could have been a digital assistant on the PC, Hologram, tv or app. So many ideas for profit streams, open API for 3rd party digital assistants with fees attached, alexa tv's running an app with a visual digital assistant, run the app on a tablet and see a digital assistant.
Even if it was a novelty, a little animated person standing on the countertop is way more interesting than speaking to an echo.
I can see how interaction with a human-like device is more engaging than Alexa (I have a Google Home speaker and feel the same)
However, then we're entering "uncanny valley", where we're always acutely aware that we're not talking to the caliber of consciousness we're used to.
Other companies have tried this: https://www.engadget.com/2018-07-25-adorable-home-robot-kuri...
Whatever voice assistant "dominates" next should be fun and not get in the way. Two very complex requirements in that particular domain.
Then OpenAI with its whisper model showed it is very much possible. The whisper model is so good, I sometimes feel like it's magic. I have tried all sorts of situations, non-native speakers, severe background noise etc, and it still does incredibly well both for English and Arabic (these are the only two I have extensively tested).
If everything in your house (curtains, standing desk, toilet paper roll holder, etc) was a connected device, think about the automations that Alexa could enable. Ask Alexa to auto raise your desk just before meetings start, to notify you if the toilet paper on the holder is getting low, and so on. Amazon could easily get creative with charging for these conveniences.
More than a 100M sold by 2019, millions more to date. Clearly something people do want in their homes.
All the devices I know of in my immediate family are collecting dust. With the exception of my great aunt and uncle, who have one in the living room and constantly complain about it/at it.
Many.
I curse her out more than anything but at this point she's almost a family member, I do wish they'd hurry up w/ a new generation using GPT3+dalle etc to create some much better ux.
I'd probably use a google home instead if I'd gotten that first, I'm not tied to the alexa brand, and hate Amazon as a whole as being a gluttonous monstrosity of industry, but I'm a big believer in global warming but still eat meat... Sometimes you just do what's convenient, I guess.
Alexa is at least 10x better than Siri for our family, but I could understand that it is hard to monetize.