[HN Gopher] Amazon's Alexa on Track to Lose $10B This Year
___________________________________________________________________
Amazon's Alexa on Track to Lose $10B This Year
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 25 points
Date : 2022-11-21 20:26 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| belval wrote:
| Sample size of 1, but I use HomeAssistant a lot more than I ever
| used Alexa/Google Home. The voice interface might be interesting
| for the next generation, but having grown with
| computer/smartphones it just feels more natural to flip a switch
| or to start a timer on my phone by clicking than just uttering
| "Alexa turn on the coffee machine".
|
| I see the value of a smart home, I just don't think Alexa is the
| best interface for it when we all carry a perfect little tablet
| that has every switch/cameras on it.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I like having an Echo on the shelf next to the sink to listen
| to music while doing the dishes so I don't have to touch
| anything with my wet hands.
|
| On the other hand I can just set an album going and not have to
| touch anything for 50 minutes.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I thought this was a great moment to take stock of these voice
| assistants and do a postmortem on why the platform failed to live
| up to expectations. Something telling from the article is that
| Alexa is used to play music and check the weather and not much
| else, no matter how hard the division tries to get people to
| order Ubers or toothpaste.
|
| I have been wondering if a next gen "GTP-4" like language model
| could take these AI assistants from being jukeboxes to actual
| assistants.
| koyote wrote:
| I feel like there are just not many truly game changing use-
| cases for a voice-activated assistant.
|
| They only ever seem to be useful if you do not have free hands
| (e.g. cooking) which is why they are almost exclusively used as
| timers (at least in my household). I have tried getting it to
| read a recipe but that's just cumbersome (I often want to have
| a quick glance at ingredients, not have someone list all of
| them in slow succession).
|
| Other actions such as "play stranger things on netflix" seem
| like useful actions at first, but again only really make sense
| if you are truly busy with your hands (which you would not be
| if you are on the couch with the remote near-by). Using the
| remote to turn on the tv and play something on netflix is often
| not more than two or three button presses (assuming the show is
| in your 'continue watching' list, which it usually is if it's
| something you specifically want to watch).
|
| And turning on lights? Again, a novelty. Unless your house is
| designed in a weird way where your light switches are on
| opposite ends of the room you are walking into, it's always
| faster to just flip the switch when walking into the room than
| shouting out and waiting for your assistant to do it for you
| (never mind the fact that shouting to turn on the lights during
| a bathroom run at night would be highly annoying to other
| household members).
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Some of the problem is not the A.I. technology but the model of
| the user interface. The model of Alexa is
| [voice input] -> [action]
|
| but to do more complex interactions it has to be more like
| [input 1] -> [ask for clarification] -> [input 2] -> [propose
| action, ask for confirmation ] -> [action]
|
| from the viewpoint of developing a training set this is
| exponentially more complicated. Maybe it is like playing chess
| or learning Atari games by reinforcement learning, but those
| games involve a small number of elements that combine in
| complex ways, whereas a conversation involves a space of
| millions of concepts. (e.g. "20 questions")
|
| It's not so much that they need any specific feature ("buy
| toothpaste") that they need some way to recover the cost, for
| instance being more tied to the Amazon ecosystem, more likely
| to subscribe to Prime, etc.
|
| It's not easy though. With roughly 70 million users they would
| need to generate about $150 a user in profit to cover $10
| billion. At 2% margin they'd need to sell $7500 worth of stuff
| that they wouldn't otherwise sell.
|
| What I don't get is where the $10 billion went: how much of it
| subsidizing the device? (If they sold 10 million devices last
| year it would be a $1000 subsidy which is incredible.) are they
| paying AWS prices to run the backend service? how much are they
| spending in software development, model training, etc?
| cscharenberg wrote:
| And in those more complex interactions there is not enough
| adjustment capability. I often want Alexa to speak faster or
| just shorter (reduce filler words and pauses). There's no way
| (I am aware of) to make it more efficient for the determined
| user.
| otikik wrote:
| > [input 1] -> [ask for clarification] -> [input 2] ->
| [propose action, ask for confirmation ] -> [action]
|
| Don't forget that between all those steps there's a "store
| everything you say in order to sell you stuff later" step
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Clearly Elon Musk should buy Amazon.
| pxtail wrote:
| Voice assistants are just too unsophisticated, lacking required
| context. Recently during a drive I decided to give the Google
| Assistant another try - Google Maps was being utilized as the
| navigation but screen was too bright for my liking - it was not
| possible to accomplish this with voice only, yes, screen got
| dimmed but in the process nav got into this small floating window
| mode and no possible voice command was able to restore it to
| fullscreen - maximize, enlarge, open, fullscreen, fullsize -
| nope. I was disappointed, such simple, basic yet usefull use case
| but it just didn't work
| [deleted]
| antoniuschan99 wrote:
| Does the loss include Amazons entire IoT lineup?
|
| The Thermostat, Air Purifier also seem like loss leaders. There
| was like 20-30 devices that were introduced a year or two ago
| which also included a microwave.
|
| Especially the thermostat, it was a joint development with
| Honeywell and is like 1/2 the cost of other Smart Thermostats.
|
| When I had an Echo it was only used to set alarms :$
|
| Also, last time I checked for the Air Purifier, you had to do ~5
| taps to get to the Air Purifier Data.
| darepublic wrote:
| I see voice assistant being useful when trying to get stuff done
| while driving or otherwise occupied. And I want to be able to
| speak with it interactively much as I would another person. Being
| able to spin up new tasks and have it appropriately begin them
| and query for needed info or on blockers like a person would
| SilverBirch wrote:
| There's this really interesting dynamic here, I would never buy
| an Alexa- why? Because it's an Amazon machine in your home
| optimized to bankrupt you. We all kind of know it, the aim is for
| Alexa to figure out ways to monetize you. But having said that, a
| smart speaker should make money! It's a bit of low margin
| consumer tech, massive volume. The only way you lose money on
| that is by.... hiring a load of AI engineers to figure out how to
| exploit your customers. It's also kind of funny, you sold all
| these devices at cost.... but why? Apple's homepod sucks, and you
| (hope) you're clearly differentiated against Google. So why not
| actually just make money selling it.
|
| I'm just mad once again, that I didn't get the benefit of venture
| subsidized consumer products.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| Good. Was never a fan of domestic surveillance technologies for
| our "convenience".
| nelsonenzo wrote:
| dang, that's a big gap. It makes meta's losses seem much more
| palatable.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-11-21 23:02 UTC)