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Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

The thing that people seem to have forgotten is that the companies that previously attempted to monetize data center based voice assistants lost massive amounts of money.

> Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year... “Alexa was getting a billion interactions a week, but most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather.” Those questions aren’t monetizable.

Google expressed basically identical problems with the Google Assistant business model last month. There’s an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make, and all of Google’s attempts to monetize assistants with display ads and company partnerships haven’t worked. With the product sucking up server time and being a big money loser, Google responded just like Amazon by cutting resources to the division.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co...

Moving to using much more resource intensive models is only going to jack up the datacenter costs.

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It doesn't help that Google also keeps breaking everything with the home voice assistants, and this has been true for ages and ages.

I only have a single internet-enabled light in my house (that I got for free), and 90% of the time when I ask the Assistant to turn on the light, it says "Which one?". Then I tell it "the only one that exists in my house", and it says "OK" and turns it on.

Getting it to actually play the right song is on the right set of speakers is also nearly impossible, but I can do it no problem with the UI on my phone.

I don't fear a future where computers can do every task better than us: I fear a future where we have brain-damaged robots annoy the hell out of me because someone was too lazy to do anything besides throw an LLM at things.

I had an annoying few weeks where, after years of working properly, Google assistant started misinterpreting "navigate home" as "navigate to the nearest Home Depot™".

not really limited to their AI products; Android just sometimes randomly decides that pressing play on BT receiver in my car should totally start playing the song directly from my phone instead of the BT it connected to

"Alexa Play SpongeBob on youtube" is met with a sabrina carpenter hit every time. no idea why

Alternative it is hit with

"Would you like Spongebob, Spongebob Sponge on the Run, the spongebob squarepants movie, or Bob Espanja Pantalones Cuadrados

I really wonder if Google has any reasonable QA people still working on this stuff.

in the “AI age” QA is automated :)

IMO the root cause has more to do with vendor lock-in, near monopolies, freemium/advertising models, etc.

The desperate wish to believe that AI is a silver bullet is fuel on a fire that was already going.

QA is the spouses of engineers. Management is a revolving door of the "smartest people" who are thinking about what to eat or their next job. Voices of reason get lost in the noise.

> QA is the spouses of engineers

I'm starting to doubt they use their own product at home.

I'm a Google engineer. I often don't even recommend our products.

I suspect most engineers at most companies, working behind the scenes to see the sausage being made, grow reservations about recommending it afterwards.

I say it as a matter of having eaten other sausages as well and discussing the various sausages with my peers (if I may extend the analogy).

Siri decided "home" was some random place several miles from me that. Couldn't get it fixed other than by changing phones.

At least you didn't have to move...

> I don't fear a future where computers can do every task better than us: I fear a future where we have brain-damaged robots annoy the hell out of me because someone was too lazy to do anything besides throw an LLM at things.

THIS!

Rename the name of the light to "the".

I'm positive Google's voice commands worked better when Google Home initially released. No idea why it has gotten so bad. Recognition seemed better when it was internal and called "Majel" though on that one I'm sure that's just rose tinted glasses.

It's weird because Gemini is so impressive multimodally but even the Gemini powered assistant can't figure out which lights to turn out, telling the TV to "play" doesn't mean turning it on (it means unpausing it!), just an incredibly frustrating experience.

I feel like you're getting at something different here, but my conclusion is that maybe the problem is the approach of wanting to monetize each interaction.

Almost every company today wants their primary business model to be as a service provider selling you some monthly or yearly subscription when most consumers just want to buy something and have it work. That has always been Apple's model. Sure, they'll sell you services if need be, iCloud, AppleCare, or the various pieces of Apple One, but those all serve as complements to their devices. There's no big push to get Android users to sign up for Apple Music for example.

Apple isn't in the market of collecting your data and selling it. They aren't in the market of pushing you to pick brand X toilet paper over brand Y. They are in the market of selling you devices and so they build AI systems to make the devices they sell more attractive products. It isn't that Apple has some ideologically or technically better approach, they just have a business model that happens to align more with the typical consumers' wants and needs.

I know you're saying that Apple's business model is selling devices but it's not like they aren't a services juggernaut.

Where I think you are ultimately correct is that some companies seem to just assume that 100% of interactions can be monetized, and they really can't.

You need to deliver value that matches the money paid or the ad viewed.

I think Apple has generally been decent at recognizing the overall sustainability of certain business models. They've been around long enough to know that most loss-leading businesses never work out. If you can't make a profit from day one what's the point of being in business?

>it's not like they aren't a services juggernaut.

It depends. I guess you can argue this is true purely from scale. However, we should also keep in mind there are a lot of different things that Apple and tech companies in general put under "services". So even when you see a big number under "Service Revenue" on some financial report, we should recognize that most of that was from taking a cut of some other transaction happening on their devices. Relative to the rest of their business, they don't make much from monthly/yearly subscriptions or monetizing their customers' searches/interactions. They instead serve as a middleman on purchase of apps, music, movies, TV, and now even financial transactions made with Apple Card/Pay/Cash. And in that way, they are a service company in the same way that any brick and mortar store is a service company.

I'm confused at what you're trying to say here. Why exactly doesn't the service revenue matter again? For some pedantic reason of Apple being metaphorically similar to a brick and mortar store?

Apple's services revenue is larger than Macs and iPads combined, with a 75% profit margin, compared to under 40% for products (hardware).

Yeah, they serve as a middleman...an incredibly dominant middleman in a duopoly. 80% of teenagers in the US say they have an iPhone. Guess what, all that 15-30% app store revenue is going to Apple. That's pretty much the definition of a service juggernaut.

I also don't agree with you about the lack of selling Apple services to non-Apple users. TV+ is a top-tier streaming service with huge subscriber numbers, and their app is on every crappy off-brand smart TV and streaming stick out there. Yes, there really are Android users who subscribe to Apple Music - 100 million+ downloads on the Google Play store, #4 top grossing app in the music category.

>Why exactly doesn't the service revenue matter again? For some pedantic reason of Apple being metaphorically similar to a brick and mortar store?

You seem to operating under the notion that anything that isn't a device sold is a service. I think that definition is too broad to have any real value and that we should look at the actual business model for a product to determine its categorization. I'm not sure what else to say if you're just going to dismiss that as "pedantic".

But either way, it should be obvious that "services" (however they are defined) are a smaller part of Apple's business than they are for Microsoft, Google, Meta, Twitter, Oracle, Open AI, Anthropic, and most other players in both the general tech and AI spaces.

It's really interesting to consider an area where they are being successful with their AI, the notification summaries work pretty well! It's an easy sell to the consumer bombarded with information/notifications all over the place that on-device processing can filter this and cut out clutter. Basically, don't be annoying. I think a lot of people don't really know how well things like their on-device image search works (it'll OCR an upside-down receipt sitting on a table successfully), I never see them market that strength ever judging by the number of people with iphones that are surprised when I show them this on their own phones.

HOWEVER, you would never know this though given the Apple Store experience! As I was dealing with the board swap in my phone last month, they would have these very loud/annoying 'presentations' every like half hour or so going over all the other apple intelligence features. Nobody watched, nobody in the store wanted to see this. In fact when you consider the history of how the stores have operated for years, the idea was to let customers play around with the device and figure shit out on their own. Store employee asks if they need anything explained but otherwise it's a 'discovery' thing, not this dictated dystopia.

The majority of people I heard around me in the store were bringing existing iphones in to get support with their devices because they either broke them or had issues logging into accounts (lost/compromised passwords or issues with passkeys). They do not want to be told every constantly about the same slop every other company is trying to feed them.

They’ve done loud, in-store presentations for longer than Apple Intelligence has been a thing, but you’re right that it’s a captive audience of mostly disinterested people.

> it's not like they aren't a services juggernaut

Apple doesn't have a paid tier for Apple Intelligence.

It's a feature and a free API developers can utilize, not a service.

Right, but Apple sells a bunch of way more profitable services, to the tune of being more revenue than Macs and iPads combined.

Apple's services have a 75% profit margin, compared to under 40% for products (hardware).

> I feel like you're getting at something different here, but my conclusion is that maybe the problem is the approach of wanting to monetize each interaction.

Personally, Google lost me as a search customer (after 25 years) when they opted me into AI search features without my permission.

Not only am I not interested in free tier AI services, but forcing them on me is a good way to lose me as a customer.

The nice thing about Apple Intelligence is that it has an easy to find off switch for customers who don't care for it.

> The nice thing about Apple Intelligence is that it has an easy to find off switch for customers who don't care for it.

Not even only that, but the setup wizard literally asks if you'd like it or not. You don't even have to specifically opt-out of it, because it's opt-in.

You can ad block the AI summary and have the same experience

Yes, there are always ways to deal with companies who make their experience shitty. The point is that you shouldn't have to, and that people will leave for an alternative that doesn't treat them like that.

Google is currently going full on Windows 10, for 'selected customers', with Gemini in Android. '(full screen popup) Do you want to try out Gemini? [Now] [Later]' 2 hours later... Do you want to...

This sort of nagging and spam should be illegal.

I feel like this is 5 or so years out of date. The fact that they actually have an Apple Music app for Android is a pretty big push for them. Services is like 25% of their revenue these days, larger than anything except the iPhone.

As I said elsewhere, it really depends on the definition of "service". Subscriptions make up a relatively small minority of that service revenue. For example, 30 seconds of searching suggests that Apple Music's revenue in 2024 was approximately $10b compared to the company as a whole being around $400b. That's not nothing, but it doesn't shape the company in a way that it's competitors are shaped by their service businesses.

The biggest bucket in that "service" category is just Apple's 30% cut of stuff sold on their platform (which it also must be noted, both complements and is reliant on their device sales). That wouldn't really be considered a "service" from either the customer perspective or in the sense of traditional businesses. Operating a storefront digitally isn't a fundamentally different model than operating a brick and mortar store and no one would call Best Buy a "service business".

Call me a naïve fanboy, but I believe that Apple is still one of the very few companies that has an ideologically better approach that results in technically better products.

Where everyone else sells you stuff to make money, they make money to create great stuff.

That is exactly why Apple's on-device strategy is the only economically viable one. If every Siri request cost $0.01 for cloud inference, Apple would go bankrupt in a month. But if inference happens on the Neural Engine on the user's phone, the cost to Apple is zero (well, aside from R&D). This solves the problem of unmonetizable requests like "set a timer," which killed Alexa's economics

On top of it, on-device models increase response times and can be really private if the developer decides.

The greed to lock customers in early on for cheap or free, in hopes to force them on a subscription, absolutely ruined the previous era os assistants. It could have been great with offline inference and foster competition. Instead we got mediocre assistants, thst got worse each year.

The assistant thing really shows the lie behind most of the "big data" economy.

1) They thought an assistant would be able to operate as an "agent" (heh) that would make purchasing decisions to benefit the company. You'd say "Alexa, buy toilet paper" and it would buy it from Amazon. Except it turns out people don't want their computer buying things for them.

2) They thought that an assistant listening to everything would make for better targeted ads. But this doesn't seem to be the case, or the increased targeting doesn't result in enough value to justify the expense. A customer with the agent doesn't seem to be particularly more valuable than one without.

I think that this AI stuff and LLMs in particular is an excuse, to some extent, to justify the massive investment already made in big data architecture. At least they can say we needed all this data to train an LLM! I've noticed a similar pivot towards military/policing: if this data isn't sufficiently valuable for advertising maybe it's valuable to the police state.

> Except it turns out people don't want their computer buying things for them.

I think this also hits an interesting problem with confidence: if you could trust the service to buy what you’d buy and get a good price you’d probably use it more but it only saves a couple of seconds in the easy case (e.g. Amazon reorders are already easy) and for anything less clear cut people rightly worry about getting a mistake or rip-off. That puts the bar really high because a voice interface sucks for more complex product comparisons and they have a very short window to give a high-quality response before most people give up and use their phone/computer instead. That also constrains the most obvious revenue sources because any kind of pay for placement is going to inspire strong negative reactions.

> Those questions aren’t monetizable. ... There’s an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make.

There lies the problem. Worse, someone may solve it in the wrong way:

I'll turn on the light in a minute, but first, a word from our sponsor...

Technically, this will eventually be solved by some hierarchical system. The main problem is developing systems with enough "I don't know" capability to decide when to pass a question to a bigger system. LLMs still aren't good at that, and the ones that are require substantial resources.

What the world needs is a good $5 LLM that knows when to ask for help.

Useful Douglas Adams reference: [1]

[1] http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=135

This type of response has been given by Alexa from an echo device in my house. I asked, “play x on y”, the response was something like “ok, but first check out this new…”. I immediately unplugged that device and all other Alexa enabled devices in the house. We have not used it since.

This is the monetization wall they have to figure out how to break through. The first inkling of advertising is immediate turn off and destroy, for me.

Even worse than ads, mine keeps trying to jam "News" down my throat. I keep disabling the news feeds on all my devices and they kept re-enabling against my wishes. Every now and then I'll say something to Alexa and she'll just start informing me about how awful everything is, or the echo show in the kitchen will stop displaying the weather in favor of some horrific news story.

Me: "Alexa, is cheese safe for dogs?"

Alexa: "Today, prominent politician Nosferatu was accused by the opposition of baby-cannibal sex trafficking. Nosferatu says that these charges are baseless as global warming will certainly kill everyone in painful ways by next Tuesday at exactly 3pm. In further news, Amazon has added more advertisements to this device for only a small additional charge..."

If I wanted to feel like crap every time I go to the kitchen I'd put a scale in there. /s

> LLMs still aren't good at that

I find this a really interesting observation. I feel like 3-4 trivial ways of doing it come to mind, which is sort of my signal that I’m way out of my depth (and that anything I’ve thought of is dumb or wrong for various reasons). Is there anything you’d recommend reading to better understand why this is true?

You are asking why someone don't want to ship a tool that obviously doesn't work? Surely it's always better/more profitable to ship a tool that at least seems to work

GP means they aren't good at knowing when they are wrong and should spend more compute on the problem.

I would say the current generation of LLMs that "think harder" when you tell them their first response is wrong is a training grounds for knowing to think harder without being told, but I don't know the obstacles.

Are you suggesting that when you tell it "think harder" it does something like "pass a question to a bigger system"? I have doubts... It would be gated behind more expensive plan if so

No? I’m interested in why LLMs are bad at knowing when they don’t know the answer, and why that’s a particularly difficult problem to solve.

Because people make them and people make them for profit. incentives make the product what it is.

an LLM just needs to return something that is good enough for average person confidently to make money. if an LLM said "I don't know" more often it would make less money. because for the user this is means the thing they pay for failed at its job.

> and why that’s a particularly difficult problem to solve

The person I responded to, who seems like someone who definitely knows his stuff, made a comment that implied it was a technically difficult thing to do, not a trivially easy thing that's completely explained by "welp, $$$", which is why I asked. Your comments may point to why ChatGPT doesn't do it, but they're not really answering the actual question, in context.

Especially where the original idea (not mine) was a lightweight LLM that can answer basic things, but knows when it doesn't know the answer and can go ask a heftier model for back-up.

I think that person should think that technically difficult thing that makes more money = gets solved and technically difficult thing that makes less money = doesn't get solved.

By the way model's don't "know". They autocomplete tokens.

> Your comments may point to why ChatGPT doesn't do it

Any commercial model which is most of them...

In part because model performance is benchmarked using tests that favor giving partly correct answers as opposed to refusing to answer. If you make a model that doesn't go for part marks, your model will do poorly on all the benchmarks and no one will be interested in it.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04664

I think of my Alexa often when I think about AI and how Amazon, of all people, couldn't monetize it. What hope do LLM providers have? Alexa is in rooms all around my house and has gotten amazing at answering questions, setting timers, telling me the weather, etc., but would I ever pay a subscription for it? Absolutely not. I wouldn't even have bought the hardware except that it was a loss leader and was like $20. I wouldn't have even paid $100 for it. Our whole economy is mortgaged on this?

This is probably why there’s so much attention on LLM powered coding tools, as it’s one of the few use cases that seem like people would actually pay for it. Ironically mostly developers, who are being marketed as being replaced by AI.

It's also a use case where you already have a user of above-average intelligence who is there correcting hallucinations and mistakes, and is mostly using the technology to speed up boilerplate.

This just doesn't translate to other job types super well, at least, so far.

I'm extremely bearish on AI, but I'm not sure I agree with the framing "not even Amazon could..." All of the advertising around Alexa focused on the simple narrow use cases that people now use it for, and I'm inclined to assume that advertising is part of it. I think another part is probably that voice is really just not that fantastic of an interface for any other kind of interactions. I don't find it surprising that OpenAI's whole framing around ChatGPT, of it being a text-based chat window (as are the other LLMs), is where most of the use seems to happen. I like it best when Alexa acts as a terse butler ("turn on the lights" "done"), not a chatty engaging conversationalist.

Some features are not meant to be revenue sources. I'd lump assistive technology and AI assistants into the category of things that elevate the usefulness of one's ecosystem, even when not directly monetizable.

Edit: IMO Apple is under-investing in Siri for that role.

Steve Jobs famously said, "If you do the right things on the top line, the bottom line will follow.”

Paraphrased: if you do things with the explicit goal to optimize revenue, it harms your business success. If you do things that optimize user experience and delight customers, it will provide more value long-term.

Voice assistants are in that latter camp, I believe. (And I think of this quote constantly as Tim Cook crams more ads into the ecosystem)

What ads did Cook cram in the ecosystem? The ones in app store?

Voice assistants that were at the level of a fairly mediocre internet-connected human assistant might be vaguely useful. But they're not. So even if many of us have one or two in our houses or sometimes lean on them for navigation in our cars we mostly don't use them much.

Amazon at one point was going to have a big facility in Boston as I recall focused on Alexa. It's just an uninteresting product that, if it were to go away tomorrow I wouldn't much notice. And I certainly wouldn't pay an incremental subscription for.

> With the product sucking up server time

This is the part that hasn't made much sense to me. Maybe just.. have a better product?

As you quoted above, "most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather." Why does any of this need to consume provider resources? Could a weather or music command not just be.. a direct API call from the device to a weather service / Spotify / whatever? Why does everything need to be shipped to Google/Amazon HQ?

From what I can tell, only Apple even wants to try doing any of the processing on-device. Including parsing the speech. (This may be out-of-date at this point, but I haven't heard of Amazon or Google doing on-device processing for Alexa or Assistant.)

So there's no way for them to do anything without sending it off to the datacenter.

Alexa actually had the option to process all requests locally (on at least some hardware) for the first ~10 years, from launch until earlier this year. The stated reason for removing the feature was generative AI.

> (This may be out-of-date at this point, but I haven't heard of Amazon or Google doing on-device processing for Alexa or Assistant.)

It was out of date 6 years ago.

"This breakthrough enabled us to create a next generation Assistant that processes speech on-device at nearly zero latency, with transcription that happens in real-time, even when you have no network connection." - Google, 2019

https://blog.google/products/assistant/next-generation-googl...

It's an obvious cost optimization. Make the consumer directly cover the cost of inference and idle inference hardware.

I had a group of students make a service like this in 2021, completely local, could work offline, did pretty much everything Alexa can do, and they made it connect to their student accounts so they could ask it information about their class schedules. If they can do it, Amazon certainly can. That they don't says they think they can extract more value from monitoring each and every request than they could from selling a better product.

My mother always enjoyed playing Jeopardy! on alexa, it was a novel format and everybody could participate while sitting around and chatting. She happily would have paid for it, even the dreaded monthly subscription, but it was neglected. The service started being buggy (lagging, repeatedly restarting the day's question series) and now they've moved on.

If anyone knows of an open-source alternative I could stitch together, I am all ears!

> There’s an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make

In my experience none of these voice assistance are accurate enough to trust with my money

nuance seems to have done ok with datacenter based voice assistants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuance_Communications#Acquisit...

The difference is previous version of alexa wasn't good enough to pay for it. Now it is good enough that millions of users are paying $10-100 for these services.

Much of the cost of Alexa wasn't the data center costs, as Alexa was not, until recently, an AI. Amazon lost tons of money selling cheap Echo speakers at below cost expecting people would use Alexa on those to buy things. Turns out, people don't like to buy things by yelling at a speaker.

It is amazing sometimes how executives can check common sense at the door, and act like consumers are some separate species from themselves.

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