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Comment by vishnugupta | Hacker News Reader

I called it out last year [1]; Amazon failed to monitze off of Alexa and it costs them quite something to keep its backend hardware & software up and running.

Going by the rumours the layoff axe fell the hardest on Alexa division. And now we see this news about 3rd party apps. Next Alexa will be put on life-support and then stop it completely 3-5 years from now. It's good that they do have bluetooth and audio cable interface so the hardware won't be bricked.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35042440

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I don't see amazon killing off Alexa given how incredible it could become with LLMs taking off.

Am I alone in thinking assistants were useful when they had a constrained set of operations that fits our heads? Now Google Maps tells Spotify to play a song called "Whats the name of this road?"

It's one of my great fascinations that assistants worked better in 2010 in my opinion than they do now. I remember setting timers, adding reminders and asking the weather back then and it was amazing, it could interpret very flexibly worded versions of my requests almost perfectly every time ("Add a reminder a week from now" etc). But steadily over the years this functionality seems to have degraded. It's got more and more hit and miss and finally I've just stopped using it. I don't really understand why ... I assume it's happened as they've tried to make the systems more flexible and accommodate wider inputs (different accents etc), it's made them worse at the more constrained use cases.

You're not alone. Maybe not 2010 though, hah.

2015-2017 was the golden age at least of Google assistant (or was it still Google Now?). Fast, responsive, and accurate.

Now in 2024 it's grindingly slow and unreliable.

I believe the hope is the nuanced language understanding of LLM could correctly parse "What's the name of this road?" and know it's not a request to pass to Spotify.

The issue with Alexa is no one successfully monetized it. How will LLMs improve monetization?

The article mentioned it: Alexa Pro or something which is a subscription to use the LLM-powered Alexa.

It's highly unlikely that a typical end consumer will pay subscription fee just to have a conversation with a device. Not saying there won’t be niche domains where this is useful but it won't reach mass adoption to justify the costs to keep Alexa up and running. Maybe they can charge for LLM + Smart home features, perhaps there could be more takers?

Either way they need to figure it out soon because the cost will keep accumulating and they can write them off only for so many quarters.

It seems they had sold 500 million Alexa devices until last year [1]. Just the hardware infra to keep servicing them is massive; not to speak of developer cost.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-has-sold-more-than-500...

I think people are getting a little weary with paying a company for physical hardware, paying a subscription fee for SAAS, paying with their private data being harvested and sold off to third parties and still getting served ads.

It just starts to feel egregious.

I wish people cared about this more. But from my own personal sampling of average non-tech people in my life, they kind of just accept it without flinching.

Drives me up the wall that people pay monthly for an otherwise static service just to keep the hardware functioning.

You should sample younger. There aren't nearly as many 'non-tech people' 16-25.

If amazon launched an LLM similar to chatgpt i guess I could pay for it and then access in alexa would be a bonus. That could make me choose amazon instead of openai, google etc.

I've only seen people use alexa to control the music player. Why do you thing they would be keen on paying for pro features while all they wanted since the very beginning was just not having to handle a remote or grab their phone to play music?

It always had tremendous potential and never went anywhere.

LLMs require either more local power (=way more expensive devices) or more server power, which someone has to pay. Power users aren't paying, as they;ll get better results through their computer or phone to access the LLM of their choice. Casual users aren't paying either, as what they want to do is too low stakes to warrant higher costs.

Amazon will probably never completely kill Alexa, but I don't see them investing much more to advance the product in any significant ways.

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