Amazon thought Alexa would be the next iPhone. But it's a glorified clock radio

I've written skills for them. The issue is that as a skill writer, you have to pay for all the CPU usage, even when almost all the benefits accrue to amazon.

Not nice.

It still seems early times with voice assistants. Working with one seems transactional as opposed to conversational, to me anyway. I think that once this is overcome and we can converse with a voice assistant they will be more widely adopted.

I'm waiting for Stable Diffusion / GPT3 level goodness for stuff like this. That will be amazing.

not sure about alexa but google assistant/nest audio is pretty great and i'm finding it quite difficult to stop using it.

i use it for everything from playing music, adding stuff to my to do list, getting sports scores, turning on/off my smart lights, to figuring out measurements and setting timers while cooking.

the speech recognition and speech synthesis is great! this is actually the only google product i still use...everything else has been replaced by apple, duckduckgo, fastmail, etc.

How can they make money for Amazon (or whomever)? Unless they sell them at a realistic end-price they’ll lose money, I can’t see people choosing voice over phone on accuracy and ease of use issues when ordering. And without feedback how can comparison shopping work?