Alexa can add things to your shopping list but not take them off. You have to manually delete items in your shopping cart. This exemplifies why Alexa was never going to be successful. It is a user hostile experience.
I use it sometimes for new items, usually when I know what I want and I specify brand. If it's not the first item, I can easily see the other options on the screen and it's not much to say to buy the second or third item on the list.
You may have to specify a quantity but if you're adding detergent, paper towels or whatever else popular, name brand item it's pretty straight forward.
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.
I could see Ameca only being compatible with Amazon services if it had been launched a few years later.
Sounds invasive and scary, but I would've said (and probably did say) similar things about a service that connected you with strangers for the purpose of getting into their cars.
Other than the fact that it broadly sounds awful, I don't see a downside. I'd sometimes love to have such a service myself: I have plenty of money to buy services and very little time when I'm busy, but when I'm not busy I have plenty of time to do these things myself, which I prefer. Hiring things to be done on a regular schedule doesn't really work for me.
But an informally-arranged, impromptu service? Maybe?
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"Alexa, mow the lawn."
"OK. Greenscape will arrive today between 3 and 4PM to mow the lawn. By the way, did you know that Husqvarna offers automated electric lawnmowers? Would you like to know more?"
beep
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Who's up for exploitation? Anyone?
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.
And, preferably, learn to answer the question asked with more brevity, as well. If I ask "what's the high for today", I don't need to hear "In Cityname, expect a high of 90 degrees", just say "90".
There are many other interactions in which almost every word is unnecessary noise and can't even be explained away as a confirmation.
This is feasible only very recently with LLMs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14149986
We all wanted an experience as simple as interacting with the human at Whole Foods checkout OR the robot at the self-checkout, but what we got was this cacophony of anything but what you came here for that is amazon.com and most modern software design.
People wonder why I long for Amazon Go years after I left Seattle and recommended that approach to various retail executives.
Is there any better way to subvert retail than to promote stealing the merchandise as the ultimate UX?
Removing items from the list is a feature that has negative return, so nobody wants to work on it.