Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

This is compounded by the multi-headed monster that large orgs like theirs have no choice but to become. If customers could trust that every day essentials had a relatively stable price and availability pattern like they trust from their local grocery store (rightly or wrongly), blind ordering might be more tenable.

But some other head on the beast wants to keep Amazon shaped like an unmonitored digital marketplace where orders are fulfilled dynamically by bidders and algorithms, so your Tide Pods could be anywhere from $6.99 to $64.99, and you might get anywhere between 10 and 100, and they might arrive tomorrow or next week, and they might come in retail packaging or as a bag of tide-pod-resembling-mystery-objects, etc.

Of course blind ordering won't work when you can't give your customers any assurances (let alone guarantees) about price, quality, volume, etc

I think Alexa was just because of Amazon's norm of spending very high on R and D. That was the reason AWS was born. No one thought people would pay something like 10x just for consistency in cloud, but here we are. One AWS could cover 20 Alexas.

Especially given the bonfire of trust that is Amazon "sponsored results". Any time I search for anything on Amazon these days I have to spend a bunch of extra time scrolling around trying to figure which of the search results is genuinely a good deal as opposed to one that's paid for placement.

Given that, why would I ever trust something like an Alexa to select a good deal for me?

I dunno, I feel like the value was priced in the purchase price for me. I would not consider paying both a purchase price and subscription fee for it and probably not a subscription fee at all because all they ever do is go up. What would I do with this dumb robot in my house when I don't agree to pay for their latest fee structure.

So for that I appreciate Alexa.

Why do you say that (both parts)? Alexa has done a good job to integrate with lots of other devices. I can control many aspects of my house through Alexa - lights, blinds, AC, sound, etc. I value that, but I don't think I value it enough to ever want to pay a subscription for it. That's as silly as whoever though selling heated seats in your BMW would fly. I made sure that in each home component I chose a solution that works locally (only AC I had to compromise for lack of options).

And with all that value it provides as a hub? My alexa can't be used to buy anything, call anyone, etc. None of that is configured or permitted as much as I can shut it down. I don't personally see the value there.

I for one am curious where Amazon chooses to draw the line. I don't want to pay a subscription to shout out local hub control commands, but they could be draconian to extra value.

And as we look at Amazon's webpage, we first have straight out ads, then a few items it hopes I might buy that are typically related to what other people buy, and maybe a mention of what I bought before, but no understanding of why I bought that one. It's not a very easy task, and one where it's easy to lose trust

The fact that they could be finally fixing this, and then are putting it behind a paywall is ironic, because if it finally works properly, people could actually start using it for buying stuff.

I disagree. The issue here is they had a really great use-case and utterly failed to deliver to the end user. No one is requesting their smart assistants to order anything because there is absolutely no support on the platforms + absolutely no user trust of how that is going to go.

If all they ever did was niche their assistant down to being a smart shopping list, it would have been a great product, and likely would have driven sales. Instead they failed at even the thing they would have been had an advantage on (selling things to customers who are buying from them directly). Google and apple would have been operating through a black box of "privacy preserving apis" to do the same with their own integrations.

Then they proceeded to suck at the stuff all the other assistants also suck at.

Agree.

Go look at the Alexa Skills for any random category and sort by "best sellers," then sort again by "average review." There isn't an ecosystem.

For Lifestyle, the "4th best selling" [1] skill is "North American Roofing," which is for a company in Tampa.

There should be more there. Given the devices with a touch-sensitive screen, some form of presence detection, location awareness, and other things, there's a lot of missed potential there.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/s?i=alexa-skills&bbn=13727922011&rh=n...

Seems like the voice-smart-home problem is the same as the voice-shopping problem: There is a limit to how many features you can/want to support in a voice interface.

y protein powder that was, I think $50s pre-2020 is now $80ish. Sigh. Goodbye Hydrowhey, back to the chalky stuff.

A bigger problem is their kids do.

If I could be assured of privacy issues, I'd be happy to give it access to my email, calendar, bank accounts etc. and then let me just use it like a Chief of Staff.

I know another company is going to come do this, but it's crazy that that company may not be Alexa/Google.

Amazon had low trust back then. It's even worse now

Kitchen timer

What's the weather

Shipping and weather alerts

So yeah, not sure where the money will come from. I get angry any time Alexa recommends anything.

> consumers don't behave like that

Computer savvy HN readers don't behave like that. My computer illiterate mother-in-law, on the other hand, kind of does. My brother-in-law got her one of those Google smart speakers years ago and she loved the thing. Finally, a computer to which she could bark orders and have them fulfilled, much like she does to any human within earshot.

The problem with this approach is that the vast majority of their installed base don't care about the smart home features.

The highest margins in smart home equipment are in the high end, as usual. However, Alexa explicitly targeted the mass consumer market. Many of those folks are completely satisfied with a couple of those "smart" switching plug things, which are dirt cheap and totally commoditized.

Many others live in apartments, and thus their options for home en-smarttening are very limited. Even if they wanted to go for a costly, sophisticated smart home setup, they can't.

Other folks just don't give a damn about smart home tech and are totally satisfied with a thermostat that they must use by walking over to it.

Maybe I'm wrong, but my instinct is that Alexa's reach is incompatible with a business model of selling smart home products for profit.

My usage is:

~30%: timers

~10%: weather

~60%: tell Alexa to add things to a shopping list, which I use when I'm at a physical store or ready to do a curbside shopping order

I'm not sure if you're intending to be literal or engaging in hyperbole to make a point, but either way it doesn't gel with our experience. Yes, we definitely set timers and ask about the weather... near us, at places we're going to, in the near future, etc. We also ask for a lot of conversions, or adjustments to measurements. My partner is a great cook and she is constantly shouting out to Alexa to convert an amount, find a substitute, confirm a cooking temp and time and things like that. I ask it factual questions all the time and usually it has an answer: these might be history, technology, medicine, whatever. Given the device's low price point and lack of any ongoing subscription it seems like a pretty good value to us, and it will even play some mood music for us while we eat and tell us where our shipment of coffee filters is.

"Alexa, order more dish detergent"

"From your recent order history, I found Cascade Dish Detergent pods, 120 count, $17.99. Would you like to order?"

"Yes"

It was super convenient when I was ordering something I had already ordered before, which is all my common purchased.

Maybe they are and we need time to see the pivot in market forces. I just want to take this moment to go on record that only seeing technology as a profit-making machine defeats the purposes of human progress. Let this be a lesson to the rest of you trying to be the next Amazon - it's not working for them. They're losing billions on Alexa and it's all their fault. You aren't bigger, faster, meaner, or better than Amazon. The only thing you can do - the only thing you must do - is focus on your customers as human beings, not just as cash registers.

I’m pretty happy with having a speaker in one of my room that can play whatever I want, all at the same time, and some basic assistant functionality. If they cost twice as much, I would still buy them.

As an owner of several Echo devices and a former owner of the Dash buttons, my household LOVED the Dash buttons. Never once have we ordered anything via Alexa, nor do we want to. With the button, you selected the EXACT item with a single button. With Alexa, you have to explain what you want, don't necessarily know the price, seller, etc. It was an all around worse UI for buying.

And that's the problem you speak of. No one wants to do that. They made a smart speaker then convinced themselves something ELSE was the killer feature and predicated the finances on that.

What about 'subscribe and save' on amazon. I never use it, but curious if it has a similar fate as ordering on alexa.

I actually trust it much more than ChatGPT since it never hallucinates and it cites its source.

Something simple like “alert me if my door is unlocked” using a ring device is impossible.

Check camel camel… Tide pods vary 25% in price, from ok to ridiculous. When Amazon runs out you’ll get subbed with third party seller (probably stolen) product.

If I could use a dash button with Target, I would use it.

is there anything wrong with that? I kind of thought that is one of the main reasons for the existence of companies, that is, to increase sales, and hopefully, profits.

Maybe it can get bundled into the smart doorbell / camera video storage subscriptions?

Exactly why Amazon Fire phone failed. So, they didn't learn their lesson. What happened to their leadership principles, specifically - Customer Obsession: Leaders start with the customer and work backwards?

Dash buttons failed because they were superseded by Alexa. And because they were a bit silly to begin with.

I don’t want Alexa to buy me a new bottle of my shampoo when it can be $10 one week at $50 the next.

But from Walmart or Target? There’s a price stability where you can basically go shopping without looking at the price tags. A price of a toilet roll won’t explode because of some price algorithm fighting each other.

They should incorporate AI and allow people to have a conversation. "Alexa, how much are Tide Pods?" "They are $10/pack right now, the last time they were lower was May 2023." "Are these cheaper than Walmart?" "No.", etc. But of course they are so greedy they want to try to funnel people directly into Amazon, and their greed is why they are don't have sales through Alexa.

Aside from books, Amazon has become my last choice as a place to order.

Take the most commonly re-ordered items on Amazon (paper towels, toothbrushes, etc) and have the user select a preferred product, brand, and fallback for each one, as well as a maximum price. Some of that is already implemented for Subscribe & Save and Whole Foods delivery/pickup orders. They could even leverage that existing system.

For less common items, first check the user’s purchase history for something similar and announce if the price has increased more than few percentage points or is not in a normal range for the product category.

That will cover a lot of cases. For the rest, refer the user to do some research on the computer.

I don't think this is right. My understanding is the average Dash Button was pressed ~5 times, which isn't bad. The problem was that "subscribe and save" generated more orders than that.

For what it's worthy, my company[1] makes a re-ordering IoT device that uses weight to re-order rather than a button click, and we generate more orders than "subscribe and save" programs. This suggests that the problem with Dash was that the habit was not easy to build, not that people wanted to see the product page.

[1] bottomless.com

Google, Facebook, Amazon, this is exactly how they design their products.

How were they envisioning to make lots of money with it in the first place?

Actually they do, just not on Amazon. If you search for 'tide pods' you'll find a WHOLE page of product listings on the first page of the search results full of duplicates and confusing quantity packages. If I do the same on Target.com there are roughly 10~12 products I can actually choose from which is much easier to decipher which one to actually order.

This is doubly true ever since they let shady sellers/scammers run free on their platform. I trust AliExpress more than I trust Amazon for any product that isn't explicitly "Sold by Amazon".

A friend of mine used to be very into that but he seemed to sour on the experience last time I talked to him.

I wouldn't. Amazon wouldn't be able to stop them selves double-dipping like they did with prime, throwing in adverts etc.

Subscription models were fine, until they weren't enough to keep big tech growth placated.

It would be very hard to convince me to buy another subscription for something like Alexa. They would be competing with all the other Big Tech subscriptions I'm paying and that budget is limited. There's only space for a few of those before any new ones become a very tough sell.

As someone who knows folks that worked on Amazon Alexa (back in its earliest days), this was almost never the focus of Alexa. It might seem cool or trendy to constantly hate on Amazon here on HN, and then somehow tie that to some comment on free market capitalism, Amazon did in fact have very normal ambitions with Alexa, build a smart assistant. Bezos, particularly envisioned building some computer from star-trek as his inspiration.

Alexa in its early days was also quite impressive for what they managed to do. It was an example of early ML scaling. They rented hundreds of houses around Seattle, had voice actors talk in different locations in the houses, collected all that data and trained a speech recognition model that was SOTA at the time. Unfortunately while their voice recognition was great, they didn’t apply this scaling approach to natural language understanding. They instead went the root of trying to manually understanding grammar, and iterating all the thousands of possible sentence reconstructions in a large decision tree to help Alexa answer your queries. This of course was hopeless, but this was also almost 5 years before OpenAI released GPT-3 so you can’t fault them for doing essentially what Siri did.

Now the issue with Alexa is like most issues big organizations face, they are slow moving and cannot pivot quickly. What they need to do, is actually hard and will need to be done by essentially a monarch CEO, he needs to delete all the work the Alexa teams have done over the last 5 years in 1 swoop and replace it with LLM’s. Many folks in Amazon made their career on improving the Alexa stack, they will of course mostly be defensive and argue vehemently against deleting entirety of Alexa tech “LLM’s hallucinate too much, we need a combined approach”, they will plead, but the stack needs to be deleted, the entire organization needs to pivot to LLMs. Apple has managed to take steps towards this, I won’t be surprised if Amazon soon will, or maybe they won’t, depends on their ability to not be disrupted.

If they are guilty of anything, it’s being unable to do good research to discover GPT-3 on their own (though tbf no one except OpenAI did this), and then being unable to ditch all the technical debt they have accumulated over 5+ years and pivot completely into LLM’s.

This has many problems. Imagine you are watching a video clip when someone orders a sack of potatoes through Alexa. What is the chance Alexa will place the order?

Or say you wanted to order flour and got flowers etc etc.

Then pranks. Guests enter your house and say "Alexa order 10 packs of cheese!" and you have to rush to cancel it.

Then Amazon has a tonne of spam and rubbish products, what are the chances you get garbage shipped to your house and not the things you wanted.

From that point of view, a robot assistant that you tell "buy me one banana what could it cost ten dollars," and it automatically buys something from their store - that's a slam dunk.

And I'm fascinated over and over again on just how bad even that experience sometimes is.

Not finding the right song on Spotify, not understanding what I'm asking, trying to push useless information on me and so on....

In the days of LLMs it looks even worse, because I would expect Alexa to use technology like that to give better answers.

And that’s the problem. I’m not shopping with Alexa, because that experience is excruciating. I’m reordering things which I was already going to order through Amazon. They’re not actually generating new sales there; they’re just saving me from having to pull my phone out.

Dash button was great and i stopped using amazon completely over it’s cancellation precisely because i don’t want to go to the app or the website. They canned it because they can’t upsell you on random crap you don’t need

How many people actually 'worked' there? Like, really did something all day?

What was the pay like?

What were the internal politics like?

Any good stories?

It happened outside of Alexa too. Every team with a public facing product was directed (it seemed) to come up with some sort of Alexa integration. It was usually dreamed up and either a) never prioritized or b) half assed because nobody (devs, PMs, etc.) actually thought it made any sense.

This is true for a surprising number of amzn/aws products

WTF are they all doing?! It's pretty much unchanged from the outside in any way that's relevant to me compared to where it was in 2014. And the few changes I've noticed have been things breaking.

I used to, for instance, have a script (I forget the Alexa term) that would turn off a few lights and then play a Pandora radio station when I gave it a "bedtime" command. Worked great for about a year, and then the Pandora plugin suddenly refused to take any combination of commands that I could figure out to play a particular Pandora station in my account. This is true from outside of the automation as well, by the way. It's just completely broken.

The weather app integration is annoying too. I wanted weather to use a different weather source, and instead of just giving me results from that weather source, it would always preface it with "Weather from BlueSky" or whatever. Maybe it's their fault and they wanted the ad blurb? But as a consumer, it sucked. I just wanted more localized weather, not an ad every time I asked for the weather.

And the "AI" behavior of the app...it was just awful. I could get better answers from Google Home devices across the board. The best Alexa would do if I asked it a question is to read the first paragraph of a Wikipedia entry, and it was about a 1 in 4 chance it would actually choose the correct Wikipedia entry.

OH, and don't get me started on the Android Alexa app (!!!). Again, the most major change was a UI update where the most important feature I ever use was hidden behind another layer of menus for no particularly good reason. And the "Kindle Accessibility" feature of reading Kindle books is so flaky I doubt anyone on the team ever uses it, from random pauses to sudden jumps back to read from the beginning of the section of the book you started on 10 minutes ago, looping forever on those same 10 minutes.

Sorry. I know it wasn't your fault. But I finally gave up on using Echo devices, and the only reason I still even have the Alexa app on my phone any more is so I can have it read a Kindle book while I'm driving, and it's so amazingly frustrating to use that it would likely be better if it didn't even exist. It's more "customer frustration" than useful.

The original AI technology spamming: Alexa Integration

By improve the Alexa experience, do you mean make it more useful for users or help it shift more chineseware for Amazon? Because as a user, I will never order anything without seeing a picture and reading reviews, voice shopping is dead on arrival

If it's the former, I imagine it's Alexa hooked up to some gimmicky LLM, and I don't see where the actual profit comes from, I would have laughed and left the room too

I can't really evaluate you since you want to stay anonymous, but you're not really giving any credibility here. FAANG being arrogant isn't really any different than flavor-of-the-year tech startup being arrogant. There are numerous stories of high-flying startups that went bankrupt a few years after rejecting an acquisition offer, including significantly multiplying their valuation and raising capital along the way. You're also in an infamously overvalued sector.

I wish you all the best but try not to fall prey to the same mindset you're criticizing Amazon for.

Amazon and Microsoft are two great examples of this. When they get close to you be weary. Go for the buy out or watch out for them trying to get ideas to steal.

I setup a routine that made it say "I heard that" at 630pm on a Friday when my MIL comes over, drinks some wine, and starts talking about the latest conspiracies her and her son have been discussing. Heh, Alexa blurting out "i heard that" in the middle of the conversation like it was listening all along worked like a charm.

"Wow, my laptop is a really expensive clipboard today"

"My monitor is a really expensive webcam stand"

"My phone is a really expensive alarm clock"

It's never not funny to me

But now its finding a ton of use as a Cocomelon device for my toddler

I’m dreading the day she learns to say “Alexa, play Cocomelon”. It’s over for me the.

As an added annoyance, I moved states and it reports the weather in my previous location, despite repeated attempts to update my home location through the app. So I don’t even ask it the weather any more.

At one point it was the cheapest whole-home, multi-speaker audio setup on the market. But I use spotify as the music source.

None of these things generate revenue for Amazon, and their feeble attempts to do so run counter to the actual utility of the device.

Example: cooking, noticed the paprika is out, or in the bathroom, noticing the razors are used up. "Alexa, add to my shopping list..." My most used Alexa feature.

A lot of Amazon engineers have probably gotten a hard kick in the face over Alexa though.

I set up the smart home stuff once, but keeping it updated with the crappy mobile app is a huge chore, most of my stuff is in Home Assistant and HomeKit, which are a lot easier to keep updated.

I'm just hoping for a Homepod 2.0 so I can throw away all Alexas and replace them with Homepods.

That said… Alexa seems like such a waste. It’s like Sony making an MP3 player. Sony Electronics was never going to make a good MP3 player as long as Sony Records wanted copy protection. These are user-hostile decisions that protect the larger business. Likewise, can Amazon deliver an AI assistant that does something else, besides get people to buy more products through Amazon more easily? No, the incentives aren’t there.

People crucified Sears for making teams compete internally but that’s literally what’s happening at Amazon at a larger scale. Teams and orgs regularly push back against helping each other. Will not waste resources to help others.

I don’t believe Amazon has a good outlook over 5 years unless they get lucky with random bets. They no longer innovate, they just copy and try to compete with scale. Even then, it doesn’t work because no one working on that product actually cares about the problem so startups can easily outcompete with “customer obsession.”

It feels a lot like the whole crypto thing

It replaces all the David Graeber "bullshit jobs". As well as about 90% of the education system.

It's not replacing them with something better, but it is cheaper.

I'm paying for chatGPT and use it quite often. I find it very useful. I don't pay for chat because there have been free options since the 80s. I don't pay for voice(chat) because there have free options for ~10yrs?

Like if both environments feel equivalent but one has a better speaker setup (or inversely if one environment feels better and both have equivalent-feeling speakers) now you're locked in? It's good marketing I guess? Very hand-wave-y

This is feasible only very recently with LLMs.

For most of the things I ask my Echo Show, it just follows up with "by the way, xxxxxxxxxxxx xxxx.... Pricing is $3/month. Do you want it?"

Fuck you. This is worse than the salespeople that bother me at Department Stores.

This means that it's a lot like shopping with a [pocket] computer is, but with even more steps.

(Nobody wants this in its present form. It does not fucking work.)

I do enjoy some aspects of having an always-listening device that I can command to do stuff (like play some music, or to turn on a light, or look up some random factoid), but they've made it almost impossible to succeed at using it to do the thing they seem to so-desperately seek: Allowing me to spend my money more freely on Amazon.

It’s a classic case of mismatched incentives - the Retail org is just focused on increasing sellers and listings because they have reviews to bail them out, but Devices really need quality results which Retail is not motivated to provide. Their recent focus on mimicking Temu and Shein is only going to make things worse.

Wanna share with us your thought process?

Heh - that eggcorn is actually applicable in this case, as they have not seen the Amazon website.

If neither of these work, then I am very frustrated on your behalf.

Pretty cringe, the number of people who were promoted for this.

10/10 not worth working for Amazon.

One: I don't want to pay a yearly fee to use a hardware device I paid for. Especially when that price will inevitably increase.

Two: Paying a monthly fee for the privilege of saying "Turn the lights on." in my own flipping home. That is very hard pass.

Three: Amazon already EOL's several smarthome products (CloudCam, Amazon Key come to mind).

I'm glad that Amazon would take a huge L if they decide to abandon their Alexa ecosystem now.

I've looked for projects but haven't found anything yet.

You don’t need a shadowy government cabal to explain Alexa persisting too long in the strategy described in the article. Just a powerful chief executive with an attachment to the product, the sunk cost fallacy, a company with too much revenue to know what to do with, some gameable downstream impact metrics, the inertia of large institutions, and empire building.

It still could’ve become an incredible product if they’d gotten on the LLM chat/agent train early enough, but alas. I mostly use mine to set timers when my hands are full in the kitchen.