[HN Gopher] Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is los...
___________________________________________________________________
Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions
Author : marban
Score : 170 points
Date : 2024-07-23 05:54 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| mPReDiToR wrote:
| I'm never paying for Alexa.
|
| They get latinum enough from datamining and privacy intrusions.
|
| As soon as they put adverts on, or charge for the smart
| timer/lightswitch functionality, I'm out.
|
| There are OSS projects and I have RasPi devices sitting around.
| Burn an SD, plug a mic in, off we go.
|
| Alexa found its way into homes because it was free and does what
| people want. Don't screw that up, add value. Make people want to
| give you money. Don't tighten your grip or star systems will slip
| through your fingers.
|
| What do I know though, I'm only a guy who has one or more of
| these things in every room of my house. SMH.
| corint wrote:
| I still believe that device manufacturers should be forced to
| reveal any keys / similar to load 3rd party firmware onto
| devices like this, if/when the devices go out of support or
| deviate in pricing from when sold (viz: Ring Doorbells adding
| subscriptions).
|
| Sure, the vendor lock does allow them to sell the device at a
| lower cost, but you pay for it later.
| infinityplus1 wrote:
| I would pay for a Jarvis style holographic AI, even if not
| fully AGI.
| wdh505 wrote:
| I saw some waifu tech that is currently available in Japan
| that should be able to have the holographic part and a port
| for current ai
|
| https://blog.dejapan.com/2018/08/life-in-japan/gatebox-ai-
| vi...
| smarm52 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/5VPB5
| nope1000 wrote:
| > More than half of customers who buy smart-camera doorbells from
| Ring, another profitable Amazon device that the company bought in
| 2018, purchase security subscriptions.
|
| Security... Subscriptions?
| ygjb wrote:
| Yes, most consumer home security products have a security
| subscription attached because they require monitoring (and many
| jurisdictions require monitoring for alarm permits to help
| reduce false alarms). For Ring, that also means the features
| listed on their product page (cloud video access and history,
| etc).
| cut3 wrote:
| Probably paying for the ability to save video recordings in the
| cloud, as opposed to paying them monthly to ensure they dont
| send goons to break into your house.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| Cloud storage. Downside is that only clips with detections are
| uploaded (plus a capture every n seconds).
|
| Alternative is something like ubiquiti that stores locally, so
| you get 24/7 recordings but it can be stolen or destroyed.
| taskforcegemini wrote:
| it is one alternative, there is plenty others. I'd suggest
| local storage with onlinebackup of any alerts (timeframes in
| which an alert occured)
| mgdev wrote:
| This is the cost of building a proprietary distribution network.
| Now they need to monetize it.
| stacktrust wrote:
| > The report also highlighted the dire need for this [AI] version
| of Alexa to make money to keep the voice assistant alive.
|
| The early iPhone left doors open for experiments that could later
| be supported and productized. Alexa failed to open up devices for
| experiments that could seed innovation. Look at the failure of
| the official "Skills" program, compared to the thriving
| HomeAssistant ecosystem that is an obvious match for smart
| speakers.
|
| If the device fails, 500K devices should be unlocked for use with
| generic Linux, instead of being relegated to landfill.
| Bluestein wrote:
| Alexa gone Lisa ...
| StressedDev wrote:
| I think Amazon actually sold 500 million Alexa devices, not 500
| hundred thousand.
| Log_out_ wrote:
| The very next in doorstopping brick technology
| saulpw wrote:
| It was the second sentence in the article: "Amazon claims it
| has sold more than 500,000". 500m units in 4 years would have
| been an unqualified success. I don't even think the iPhone
| sold 500m in its first 4 years.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| The article appears to be simply wrong.
|
| In May of 2023, Amazon reported that over 500,000,000
| Alexa-enabled devices had been sold:
| https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/5/amazon-introduces-
| four-...
|
| Now, of course: "Alexa Enabled" includes many things other
| than Amazon's own line of Echo smart speakers.
|
| But at least one source suggests that Echo devices sold
| 0.88mm units the first year alone (2014), with tens-of-
| millions sold each year in more recent times:
| https://www.businessofapps.com/data/amazon-
| statistics/#Amazo...
| skhunted wrote:
| 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.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| I can see why it was the case from engineering standpoint:
| adding a name from spoken phrase to a list is trivial, but
| looking up an item (that might not even be there) from a list
| based on a spoken phrase is prone to transcription errors. The
| user might refer to it with different phrasing than when it was
| added too.
|
| This is feasible only very recently with LLMs.
| brianwawok wrote:
| That's a terrible argument. You found the item to add it.
| Just search a list 1/100000000 as big to find the item to
| remove. I can do with this Python and text to speech with no
| AI.
| skhunted wrote:
| I don't see why one direction is harder than the other. The
| only thing that makes sense to me is that Amazon is user
| hostile and tries to dupe people into buying stuff even if
| they don't want it.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Amazon is pretty generally user hostile. We see it in their
| corporte behavior too. I think for that reason culturally
| they'd struggle to design a device users want to interact
| with.
| davidthewatson wrote:
| That's right. See:
|
| 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?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Go
| leni536 wrote:
| It's far more mundane than that. Adding items to the list is
| a core feature, so there is plenty of engineering time
| getting assigned to it.
|
| Removing items from the list is a feature that has negative
| return, so nobody wants to work on it.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| In addition to that, the inability of Alexa to just answer your
| question and shut up seemed to have gone way off the tracks.
|
| 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.
| ultrarunner wrote:
| This is the single thing that killed ours.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Minus the sales pitch (which I've never had), this is one of
| the complaints I have about Google Assistant. "By the way, if
| you ever want to X, just say Y". Just answer the question
| asked and then shut up immediately.
|
| 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".
| im3w1l wrote:
| The reason they say "In cityname" is probably because they
| aren't 100% certain of your city. The preface lets you
| catch the mistake if it makes it.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Yeah, I'm aware, though in general the devices have a
| location specified. But even then, "90 in cityname" would
| suffice.
|
| There are many other interactions in which almost every
| word is unnecessary noise and _can 't_ even be explained
| away as a confirmation.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| The shopping aspect is approximately useless. It is an awful
| experience: It seems to be incapable of producing good results,
| and it is impossible to correct the results without using some
| manner of computer.
|
| 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.
| mFixman wrote:
| I'm glad that Amazon thought they could make money with
| Alexa; mine is currently fantastic as an universal remote
| control (using Zigbee) and music player (using Spotify).
|
| I could see Ameca only being compatible with Amazon services
| if it had been launched a few years later.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| For me the killer app was listening to music while doing the
| dishes.
| janalsncm wrote:
| If Alexa could do the dishes for me that would absolutely
| be a killer app.
| whateveracct wrote:
| heh I'm sure a PM with a relevant metric punted on that ticket
| plenty times.
| o_nate wrote:
| I ask Alexa to remove things from my shopping list all the
| time. It always asks you to confirm, but then it does remove
| it. Sounds like maybe you're talking about the Amazon shopping
| cart, not the generic shopping list feature?
| tiltowait wrote:
| How does shopping with one even work in practice? Most items I
| buy on Amazon require careful scrutiny to make sure I'm getting
| the right thing. What I want is almost never the first result.
| This is true even in areas that feel like they should be easy,
| like video games.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| It's great for repeat items. Stuff I've bought before I need
| more of. Buy "X" and the first item is the thing I've bought
| before. I use it that way when I know I need it, but I don't
| want to forget. So I just say it, and it's done and I don't
| need to remember or record it somewhere or pull out a phone
| or what have you.
|
| 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.
| eastbound wrote:
| But they jack up the prices every few months, right? You
| can get the original at the original price, but from the
| new vendor "OUFIOU"...
| dylan604 wrote:
| For those that do have an Alexa, how _does_ this work? Do you
| have to haggle with Alexa, and then it picks from the
| different sellers that meets your haggling? It seems like a
| much longer conversation is needed than "Alexa, add Tide
| Pods to my list" as Amazon propaganda wants you to believe.
| fckgw wrote:
| If you say "add Tide Pods" then it adds the most popular
| listing of Tide Pods, shipped and sold by Amazon to your
| cart. Which is how 98% of people buy stuff on Amazon
| already.
|
| 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.
| mihaaly wrote:
| I'd imagine a shopping list could mean any vague things from
| nerby grocery (i.e milk, and if there are eggs then 6) to
| electronics (a sound recorder for my wife) without much
| specificity. To refine later or already have family
| understanding (eggs = organic vary large ones from black tail
| hens of the Fen Farm). A vocal fridge board basically.
| Shopping lists do not imply ordering items Right Now! Now!
| Neither a specific marketplace at a specific time with
| specific stock. Just a record about something. That the user
| will pick up and do something about it in a follow up step.
| E.g. clear a single item because fuck that sound recorder!
| theGnuMe wrote:
| The app on ios is dreadful...
| StressedDev wrote:
| The basic problem is Alex never had a business plan, which means
| Amazon never figured out how to build a profitable (sustainable)
| business. It also looks like Alexa's leadership gamed internal
| metrics to make Alexa look far more successful than it really
| was. I think this is what we can learn from Alexa:
|
| 1) Do not assume you can build a business, and then make it
| profitable. You always need to understand how a business can
| become profitable. Also, avoid fuzzy ideas, and metrics. For
| example, claiming unprofitable product X, is a success because it
| helps a company's brand, or causes people to buy more of product
| Y unless you have very very very strong evidence to back up these
| claims.
|
| 2) Dishonesty and bullshit do not work - Leaders, and teams need
| to be honest with themselves and with senior leadership. Do not
| use metrics to mislead other people, and point out flaws and
| limitations in metrics. Also, misleading people in general is not
| a good idea, and it harms organizations.
|
| 3) While killing products prematurely is a bad idea (see Google),
| continuing to support failing products for decades is probably
| not a good idea either.
|
| I wish the Alexa team luck. I hope they can figure out how to
| create a profitable business which delights customers.
| msoad wrote:
| > The technology isn't there, but they have a deadline
|
| The technology is there, as demonstrated by OpenAI's ChatGPT
| Voice Mode. With the resources and talent that Amazon possesses,
| they should at least be able to demo something similar. It's just
| that the Alexa organization is a mess, which prevents it from
| happening.
| shell_game wrote:
| Does Amazon actually have talent and resources though?
| ysacfanboi wrote:
| Not any more. Majority of talent got fired. Whoever is hired
| now will be gone in a couple years (says the internal
| tracking software that tells you how "new" you are across all
| of Amazon). That kind of churn ensures no real progress can
| be made.
|
| Just throw Alexa away already. It's a wrap.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| The actually good people left long before anyone got fired.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Amazon doesn't have the talent.
|
| They do have many layers of metrics-massaging incompetent
| management that spends time attacking the people who do the
| real work.
| Log_out_ wrote:
| Metric hacking is still hacking, just not machines but
| processes. Mbas are golemn hackers,real recognizes real.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I don't think they can.
|
| One of the things that will define the AI era is that the cost
| of computation for one user drastically outweights what you
| could normally make in ad revenue.
|
| Thats why I have to pay more for Chat-GPT than I do for
| Netflix.
|
| What do you think adoption would look like Alexa costs 20 a
| month on top of the hardware? Because that may be approximately
| what it would cost for Amazon to be able to run an AI to power
| Alexa.
|
| Apple is the only one that is partially immune to this, because
| they can run the software on your phone, at least some of the
| time.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Maybe AI as a service? End user pays for AI once and most
| things that need AI capabilities offload it to that provider.
| o_nate wrote:
| I assume the piece of technology that is missing is a reliable
| way to combine generative AI features like ChatGPT Voice Mode
| with the existing voice assistant features of Alexa.
| InfiniteRand wrote:
| I definitely think Amazon music's growth is completely Alexa
| driven but not sure how much revenue that makes
| ysacfanboi wrote:
| You'd be incorrect. Amazon Music is not as valuable as people
| think, compounded by the fact that it helps foot the bill for
| Alexa. It's only right though, seeing as Music helped
| completely break Alexa internally. Repeatedly.
| baq wrote:
| I only have Amazon Music because I've got some Alexa
| speakers, so not sure which way the causation is presented,
| but end result is I am Amazon's MRR, however small that is.
|
| ...that said, the Amazon Music app doesn't have an option to
| cast to Alexa and that's beyond dumb.
| o_nate wrote:
| That's definitely true in my case. The only reason I pay for
| Amazon music is so I can use it on Alexa.
| fantasybuilder wrote:
| Isn't Amazon Music included for free with Prime? It must be the
| biggest reason for its growth. I personally don't know anyone
| who pays for Amazon Music without Prime.
| listless wrote:
| The entire business model was people being willing to buy things
| "site unseen". This is not how people shop. Seeing is an
| important part of the experience.
|
| Also, these losses are staggering. And yet they are still selling
| these things. I just bought one for the kids dorm room.
| Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 wrote:
| One other reason is that the quality of Amazon listings has
| really nosedived over the last decade. There are too many
| spammy merchants in the marketplace now. You cannot just trust
| the name or description - you need to look at the reviews (or
| other websites) these days before you feel confident about your
| purchase.
|
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The reviews can be bogus too. I've just stopped shopping on
| Amazon. Their business model isn't trustworthy.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> One other reason is that the quality of Amazon listings
| has really nosedived over the last decade.
|
| I stopped using Amazon years ago when I had four purchases of
| completely different and random items all turned up to be
| counterfeit. One was a Microsoft ergonomic keyboard, the
| other was a pair of Lucky brand jeans, the other was a pair
| of Ski goggles and the last thing was a Topo Designs
| backpack.
|
| I've also noticed that when I came back looking for something
| simple like a charging block for a new phone, I had pages and
| pages of Chinese merchants who all had similar looking
| products but just different brand names stamped on them.
|
| But I agree with everything you're saying, its not just
| logging on, finding what you need and ordering something. It
| takes ungodly amounts of due diligence to make sure what
| you're buying is a) a legit product and b) its not some
| suspect seller that's paying people to write fake reviews.
| joshjje wrote:
| There's a video on YouTube of some guy gathering pee bottles
| discarded by Amazon drivers/contractors, created a fake
| drink, and got it listed on Amazon to the top spot.
| arder wrote:
| It's _especially_ not how people shop at Amazon. You could
| feasibly imagine a shop where there is basically 1 version of
| each thing. Like the low cost supermarkets in the UK, they 're
| efficient because they have very small product inventories. In
| that scenario you say "I'll buy some ketckup" and they only
| have 1 ketchup so you don't need to see it. You know the shop,
| you know what you're getting. Amazon is the polar opposite, for
| any given product it'll have 100,000 options and you have to
| fight Amazon every step of the way to find what you want, not
| just what will give Amazon the fattest margin.
| fckgw wrote:
| If you say "add Heinz ketchup" or "add Bounty paper towels"
| then it works exactly how you describe. It's not really that
| complicated.
| crooked-v wrote:
| Costco is the biggest name I can think of devoted to that
| model. They're very aggressive about keeping to a short list
| of high-quality products in each possible subcategory, even
| for online sales.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| You bought an Alexa..... For the kids dorm room...?
|
| Wanna share with us your thought process?
| listless wrote:
| It was requested for...weather, alarms, music. You know - all
| the things his phone ALREADY DOES.
| chasd00 wrote:
| you can use routines to get alexa to talk pretty dirty. heh
| I bet it's good for a dorm room laugh or two.
| baq wrote:
| Of the precious little Alexa can do reliably announcing that
| dinner is ready without having to yell is quite useful.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| How big is your house? Just looking to understand under
| what circumstances what you said might be a good idea.
| Where I live it would be silly.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Do you value your family's privacy at all?
| scubbo wrote:
| > willing to buy things "site unseen"
|
| Heh - that eggcorn is actually applicable in this case, as they
| have not seen the Amazon website.
| pjmlp wrote:
| All these voice assistants are gimmicks to me, they hardly
| provide any value, plus never get a proper Portuguese support.
| genericacct wrote:
| Can't entirely agree, alexa makes navigating smart TVs much
| easier for older folks
| pjmlp wrote:
| Doesn't help if language recognition is broken.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| older folks struggle with the set up so the efficacy is
| mixed.
| _-_-__-_-_- wrote:
| I managed to set one up for my in-laws. It works well enough
| with their smart tv (a plasma lg from 2010) that they can say
| "Alexa cable tv" or "Alexa Die Hard" and it will turn on the
| tv, find the streaming service that has the movie, and start
| playing. The voice incantation does have to be fairly
| specific and it did take some practice to figure it out.
| hulitu wrote:
| > they hardly provide any value,
|
| maybe for you. Sincerely, the CIA.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Voice controlled radio + timers is more than worth the cost of
| an Alexa device. Why does it have to be more than that?
| pjmlp wrote:
| If it doesn't speak my native language without gimmicks, it
| is trash.
|
| Additionally, I already have a radio and alarm clock.
| burningChrome wrote:
| Doesn't your smartphone have both of these already?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| My smartphone does not auto play from my kitchen speaker
| with voice control, no. Sure I could just use a normal
| speaker but dealing with connecting to it and siri's crap
| voice control is worse than alexa.
| bentt wrote:
| I just want to point out that you can't spell Alexa without Al
| mitjam wrote:
| Can I reflash an Alexa with an Open Source Firmware? Or is there
| another documented way to repurpose it? I've tried to find
| something but was not successful. I Like the industrial design of
| the Alexa Show but not its Software/Service.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| > Amazon claims it has sold more than 500,000 Alexa devices
|
| I think they left a few zeroes off this one:
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-has-sold-more-than-500...
| saberience wrote:
| The strangest thing with Alexa is how it seems to have gotten
| worse and worse over time. That is, my Alexa right now has issues
| doing the most basic thing, it can't even play music right
| anymore.
|
| I remember when my friend in LA first showed me Alexa, playing
| music was all we used it for and it worked great for that.
| Somehow it's degraded over time and now it barely every picks the
| song or band I asked for. There was a time when I used Alexa for
| managing every light in my house, now I just gave up on
| everything except music, and I'm almost done with that part now
| too.
| fhub wrote:
| I've set a countdown timer and then asked it "how much time is
| left on the timer?" and it says "You have no timers set" then
| inside say 30s, the timer goes off. Has happened to me a half
| dozen times in the last 2 months (at different amounts of time
| left obviously). This was my primary use case of alexa and now
| I just use Siri on my phone when my phone is nearby. Siri isn't
| ideal as I find it hard sometimes to quickly see how much time
| is left on the timer. But at least it doesn't forget one is
| running.
| arder wrote:
| That "Downstream impact" metric sounds like a big yikes. Massive
| incentives to game that metric and before you know it you've got
| 10 projects all claiming credit for some theoretical downstream
| impact all of which are actually just canabalizing existing
| revenue. Like, Amazon is doing $5Bn of revenue selling tide pods,
| the Alexa team make some claim about people's likeliness to order
| tide pods via the Alexa and before you know it Amazon is still
| doing $5Bn of revenue selling tide pods but they've got a $2Bn
| cost centre of overpaid enginers designing hardware that lets you
| order tide pods.
|
| I wonder which way this splits for Amazon though, on the one hand
| lots of people already have Alexas and so you've got great brand
| recognition when you want to sell your Gen AI doodad. On the
| other hand, your Alexa brand is trash, everyone knows its
| basically only good for timers so maybe no one will take them
| seriously when the Gen AI version comes out.
| klodolph wrote:
| Tech companies have to cannibalize existing revenue to stay
| relevant long-term. If you don't cannibalize your own revenue
| streams, then some other company will figure out how to take
| your revenue. ( _Innovator's Dilemma_ takes this concept and
| stretches it out across a whole book.)
|
| 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.
| adolph wrote:
| I don't Sony Electronics can blame the music side of the
| house for Memory Stick.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Stick
| klodolph wrote:
| Sure, I agree that not 100% of all bad decisions ever made
| by Sony Electronics can be blamed on Sony Records.
|
| The number is not 0% either.
| treis wrote:
| It does seem important for the ecosystem. I'm on Google Music
| because Spotify & Amazon Music didn't work well with android
| auto & Google Home.
| skellera wrote:
| Downstream impact is gamed internally at Amazon.
|
| 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."
| wnc3141 wrote:
| I think even if Amazon stagnates, servicing that core
| business at scale is a once in a generation moat.
| bluGill wrote:
| Maybe, but Amazon is already from the previous generation
| and so by your metric another is due. Good luck starting
| it.
| StressedDev wrote:
| Retail is extremely competitive. Amazon does not have the
| best prices, and has a horrible experience for shopping.
| It's basically a specialized search engine with lots of ads
| at this point. Also, the things which made Amazon shopping
| a no-brainer are gone. Items no longer always arrive within
| two days if you have Prime, there are lots of poor-quality
| items, and it's hard to find what you really want. Finally,
| it's obvious Amazon's retail employees are not customer
| obsessed. Look at the web site design, and ask yourself if
| you would design a retail web site like Amazon's?
|
| My guess is Amazon's retail business will eventually start
| declining as customers discover it's relatively expensive,
| and it's too easy to buy low quality items.
| onion2k wrote:
| Prime _is_ Amazon 's moat though. More than 100 million
| people subscribe to a service that locks them into
| choosing Amazon first. People with Prime choose Amazon
| over going to a physical store. It's what took Amazon out
| of being an e-commerce business and into being a retail
| business. Don't underestimate how important Prime is to
| Amazon - it's literally a vendor lock-in that generates
| billions directly through fees and tens of billions
| indirectly through additional sales.
| gen220 wrote:
| It is until it isn't. The value of prime has largely
| being hollowed out and competed away in the last five
| years, from my perspective as a recently-cancelled Prime
| member.
|
| When the next recession comes, look for the diff in churn
| rate between Prime and Costco memberships.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I mean, Sears is still around, if barely.
|
| Other retail giants had been seen as walking dead for
| decades in the 1970s and 1980s before finally falling.
|
| Though drivers then and now may differ. Old-school retail
| benefitted from purchase contracts (dedicated suppliers,
| corporate buyers), as well as service contracts (for
| purchased kit). Back when durable goods might actually last
| 15, 20, 30 years, this meant that at least a _trickle_ of
| income was still coming in. Sears rather famously botched
| this hard when it used its automotive repair unit to commit
| nationwide fraud, see in 1992: "Accusation Of Fraud At
| Sears"
| <https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/12/business/accusation-of-
| fr...>.
|
| How durable Amazon might prove under similar mismanagement
| in the globalised Internet age is ... an interesting
| question.
| onion2k wrote:
| Amazon is the same as Google, Meta, Twitter, etc in the sense
| that they have a couple of _wildly_ profitable products that
| enables the company to 'play' at running some other
| businesses that _might_ turn a profit eventually after
| investing fifty billion. For Amazon it 's the retail business
| and AWS. For Google it's AdWords. For Meta it's Facebook Ads.
| These businesses will never die, or even face a threat to
| their futures, despite throwing billions at self-driving
| cars, AI, phones, VR, etc.
|
| The only existential threat to FAANG companies is a shift in
| consumer behavior away from spending money on things they see
| ads for. That's _quite_ unlikely.
| pwthornton wrote:
| I'd pay a monthly/yearly fee to be able to run Alexa's that can
| function as a smart home voice controller that does not try to
| sell me stuff.
| bluGill wrote:
| But of course there is no option for that as they think
| advertising is more valuable. Worse they have set the initial
| price as free and so now most people will object to paying
| despite how useful it is (I've seen some uses of Alexa that are
| probably not worth a monthly price, can they make money on
| $5/year for 10 devices?)
| balls187 wrote:
| Not me.
|
| 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.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| I find voice AI creepy as it's always listening. If you have to
| press a button to get it to start listening then you're better
| off typing your query. Plus I scan and read faster than an AI
| reads responses. I'd pay more for products that dont support
| it. (similar story for smart TVs).
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| I'm confused. This is already a thing via vendor, Hubitat or
| Home Assistant plugins.
| sfblah wrote:
| Right. Just charge a low fee, or attach it to Prime somehow.
| I'd pay for sure.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| I still cannot believe Amazon convinced people to install 1984
| surveillance in their homes, much less pay for it, for whatever
| trivial conveniences the stupid thing offers. It's not Amazon's
| fault but it's just strange to me how sideways our culture is
| that it's considered normal to let a corporation have unfettered
| access to your private space and _pay_ them for being there.
|
| I get the tradeoff with smartphones...at least they have utility,
| and at least some weak guarantee of privacy (for whatever that's
| worth). What does Alexa really bring to the table? It can flip a
| light switch for me? I have a finger for that. It can tell me the
| weather? I can open the curtains and look outside. It can deliver
| counterfeit garbage to my house? No thanks.
|
| Who is enticed by this thing, and why?
| tantalor wrote:
| I'll explain in Steve Jobs language:
|
| A voice assistant, a home automation controller, and an
| internet-connected speaker. Are you getting it? These are not
| three separate devices. This is one device!
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| > I have a finger for that.
|
| You have to get your finger to the switch.
|
| > It can tell me the weather? I can open the curtains and look
| outside.
|
| That doesn't tell you the weather today, just the weather right
| now.
|
| > It can deliver counterfeit garbage to my house? No thanks.
|
| Garbage often is sufficient. I don't need good quality goods in
| most cases.
| nikolajan wrote:
| What a weird take.
|
| What can a phone do for me, I can tap my finger a few times to
| send a message over telegram.
| pessimizer wrote:
| No you can't.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > Who is enticed by this thing, and why?
|
| I don't know man, I guess you're just better than everyone else
| and people are just dumb mindless cows that do stupid things
| that don't make any sense.
|
| You'll probably never figure it out because it's just so
| stupid. It's impossible to think about the reasons, because
| they just don't make any sense. Why waste your time on it?
|
| You should leave figuring things like this out to people who
| can think about multiple angles of the same concept, or hold
| opposing ideas in their heads at the same time. You just keep
| doing the right stuff and leave this kind of pontificating to
| the idiots.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| It can tell me the time when I'm wondering if I should just get
| up or have two hours left without me having to open my eyes and
| look for my glasses.
|
| It can set a timer when I have my hands full with veggies and
| cooking utensils.
|
| It can tell me what the weather will be later that day while I
| get dressed without me having to navigate my phone to the
| weather app.
|
| Could I do without all that? Sure. But its usefulness is
| undeniable to me.
|
| And it was cheap. Also, I consider my phone way more
| 1984-esque, as it knows and probably tracks my location, half
| my thoughts, half my conversations, lots of other habits, and
| could eavesdrop on me all the same.
| geodel wrote:
| I don't have it. Last year I visited family in India and
| surprised to see so many of my tech illiterate family and
| relatives are all Alexa users. Mother used it to play
| devotional songs every morning. They don't have anything to
| order from Amazon , neither there is any notion or concern
| about privacy. Its pure convenience and work like magic.
|
| As an aside they do seem to be heavily radicalized by social
| media and hilariously think they were always like this.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I feel the same way. I reject all this kind of stuff, as in
| real life it doesn't work very well and doesn't solve any
| problems I have. My light switches have never failed. Neither
| are setting timers and playing music things that vex me.
| Computers fail all the time, either literally, or by popping up
| some irrelevancy that gets in the way of what I want to do.
|
| I want dumb devices that I directly control and that do not try
| to second guess what I mean or suddenly behave differently or
| have to "restart" because an update got pushed out, or have to
| deliver an advertisement before they will do what I asked.
|
| I'll never have an Alexa or anything like it. But, I get that
| some people like gizmos and their perception is different. They
| are welcome to do whatever they want.
| paxys wrote:
| So according to you corporations are listening to you 24x7
| through your phone and you are okay with that for whatever
| reason, and they also spy on your home 24x7 through Alexa and
| that is unacceptable?
| chasd00 wrote:
| one surprisingly useful thing it did for me involved my phone.
| I couldn't find my phone and i think i just blurted out "alexa,
| i can't find my phone" jokingly. it then responded if it should
| call it. I said yes, and then my phone started ringing and i
| was able to find it. That was pretty useful actually.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Just an hour ago I asked Alexa
|
| "Is negative ten an even number?" and was shocked when it said
|
| "No, minus ten is a negative number and is not even"
|
| I asked again and the reply was exactly the same. Variations of
| the question still resulted in
|
| 'negative numbers cannot be even or odd'
|
| I checked again 20 minutes later and it then gave me correct
| answers to the exact same questions. I deeply want Alexa to fail
| as a product. It is constantly objectively wrong and should not
| be used for anything important.
| spyspy wrote:
| > It is constantly objectively wrong and should not be used for
| anything important.
|
| Welcome to AI. I got into an argument with a junior dev about
| some coding best practices the other day and came to find he
| was using chatgpt as a source for his argument. It's terrifying
| anyone takes anything an AI says as truth. Now I'm afraid to
| even ask my google home simple math or kitchen measurement
| questions.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Update: I asked again if -1000 is even or odd, and Alexa
| continues to think negative numbers can never be even or odd.
| ergonaught wrote:
| We have several Alexa devices. We use them all the time and for a
| wide variety of purposes. By any rational, actual customer-
| connected metric, they are a wild success in this and similar
| homes.
|
| This is an example of Amazon not actually letting the smartest
| people into the room. We do vast amounts of our shopping via
| Amazon, but that's through the app and website even when we
| manage the shopping lists/etc via Alexa. We're not going to do
| that directly through the robot. We're never going to do that
| directly through the robot. Anyone who proposed billions in R&D
| investments hanging on the delusion that we will do that through
| the robot, instead of paying attention to the things we are all
| actively actually doing every single day, should have already
| been moved along.
|
| We don't need to shop like that.
|
| We do need the hundred other things we do every day, and those
| are things Alexa currently does _vastly_ better than the
| competition. The Prime stuff, the Kindle stuff, the dozen other
| Amazon-related things we do, are certainly further embedded into
| our lives by the fact of the Alexas.
|
| Their real problem is the sudden closing of the gap, which is
| nearly certain to occur in the next year or two.
|
| TLDR: "Amazon says you're using it wrong. Doesn't know how to
| count."
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| What do you use yours for? Mine's little more than a fancy
| voice-activated light switch.
|
| Fully agree on the point about not shopping through Alexa.
| Basic questions are misinterpreted in sometimes hilarious ways.
| djeastm wrote:
| I have enough Echoes to cover my whole place within speaking
| distance and they serve as fancy voice-activated light
| switches and also timers, radios/music/podcast players (via
| Spotify) and calculators/measurement converters. They also
| provide local weather alerts and let me know when an Amazon
| package has arrived, both of which are nice.
|
| But whenever it tries to sell me anything, I get annoyed
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Thanks for mentioning the Amazon package alert. I hadn't
| set mine up.
| 8note wrote:
| They maybe should count the times when you add something to
| your shopping list, via Alexa, then later purchase it through
| another method. If you didn't have the voice box, you may
| forget that you needed that thing
| fantasybuilder wrote:
| I absolutely agree. They are not positioning Alexa correctly in
| the market. It's a tremendous opportunity to move towards a
| smarter integrated home and a personal assistant. Buying even
| basic things using voice will never make sense.
|
| I use Alexa daily to voice-control devices in my Hubitat. Once
| there is an easy to set up local voice control option I will
| remove Alexa. Unless they reposition themselves as something
| more useful.
| paxys wrote:
| The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that
| would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an
| afterthought. How convenient would it be if people could shout
| "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home
| and the order got magically processed? That demo definitely got
| applause from a boardroom full of execs.
|
| The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. This is
| also why Amazon's Dash buttons failed. I always want to see a
| page with the product details and price before I click "buy".
| Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my
| decision and suddenly order more things.
|
| If they want to salvage Alexa, they need to forget shopping and
| start doubling down on the smart home and assistant experience.
| The tech is still pretty much where it was in 2014. Alexa can set
| timers and tell me the weather, and...that's basically it. Make
| it a value add in my life and I wouldn't mind paying a
| subscription fee for it.
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| I don't think any of that is true. If Costco produced such
| features in their imaginary product, people may use it. Why?
| Because Costco has proven itself trustworthy of a blind repeat
| purchase. You could trust the price you're paying is typical
| and fair. Amazon on the other hand...
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Yes, Costco is like the opposite of the Amazon experience.
| Costco will only carry a few brands of any given item, but
| they're all generally pretty good with nothing drop-shipped
| from a random AliExpress vendor. Their house brand - Kirkland
| - is pretty good as well. It's a curated set of products with
| a relatively small number of SKUs vs. Amazon's flea-market-
| like experience.
| 39896880 wrote:
| The Kirkland house brand is often backed by one of the name
| brands they sell. They have quality metrics for Kirkland
| and they check the products regularly. If the quality dips,
| they swap out the provider.
| rainbowzootsuit wrote:
| This used to be the Sears Kenmore & Craftsman model where
| appliances were really Whirlpool, or Maytag, Carrier{1}.
|
| Hand tools variously came from many OEMs like SK, Plumb,
| Knipex, and Williams{2}. I suppose they still do, now at
| Lowes, but the OEM is Chinese.
|
| {1}https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/How_to_identify_who_made_y
| our_Ke...
|
| {2}https://forum.toolsinaction.com/topic/2118-craftsman-
| date-co...
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| The big thing with Sears Craftsman (formerly), and Costco
| (currently) is that the company will back the product.
|
| If I want to return a product to Costco, I have really
| strong confidence that they will take it back.
| swozey wrote:
| Costco really needs to get new products in or I don't think
| it will do well with genz and younger millennials.
|
| I hadn't been to a Costco since I was a kid so I had
| completely forgotten that the only stock (maybe) a few
| versions of specific items. I went a year or two ago
| thinking I'd come home with months worth of groceries and I
| was shocked that it STILL looked like the inside of a 1990s
| fridge and cabinet with such incredibly healthy options as
| (only) Sunny Delite and Tropicana for orange juice, massive
| boxes of Lays chips and cheezits and popcorn. I saw so few
| items that weren't basically boxes of corn syrup and sugar
| in some form. There's so many healthier snacks nowadays.
|
| I didn't expect a complete grocery experience but I was
| expecting it to have far more healthy options these days,
| or even just more options in general.
|
| I don't eat any of this stuff. I guess you're a costco
| family or not. I was a costco family as a kid and had to
| learn how to eat healthy after shoving soda down all day
| long my entire childhood.
|
| edit: Yeah I'm looking just at their juice section here and
| there's not a single less-sugar option just as an example
| https://www.costco.com/juice.html.
|
| Although, damn, $18.99 for 24 ojs is good. But both options
| are so disgustingly sweet. I had a single OJ for $7 from
| einsteins yesterday.
|
| edit: Go down the orange juice flavor pack "Why do they all
| taste different" rabbit hole with me.... https://old.reddit
| .com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5mpdop/e...
| meroes wrote:
| What's healthier than being able to buy massive amounts
| of high quality fish and beef and decent quality
| vegetables and fruit, with zero extra ingredients? Same
| for legumes, farro, brown rice, etc. They have tons of
| zero sugar drinks as well.
|
| I can't eat that healthy via other grocery stores because
| it's too expensive typically.
| NickC25 wrote:
| if you want healthier juice....buy a juicer and make it
| yourself. You're never going to get healthy options from
| a wholesaler who buys from massive brands that are not
| known for healthy options. Long term, making it yourself
| is cheaper too.
|
| Most of the time in the juice space, anything that is
| designed to be shelf-stable in a warehouse is not. at.
| all. healthy. It's packed with preservatives and other
| stabilizers that are not good for you to consume. Or it
| has been pasteurized, which kills the vast majority of
| the nutrients in the liquid itself.
|
| I will say as a caveat, that the Kirkland Signature
| Organic Coconut Water is quite good.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Are there actually good juices on the public market? I'm
| pretty sure anything you don't squeeze yourself has been
| reconstituted from parts.
|
| I was chatting up a hotel chef recently and he told me
| the lil 8oz of 'proper' orange juice he gave me cost more
| to put on the table than the entire rest of the breakfast
| combined.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Well Sunny D is an "orange drink" and there are various
| widely available "fresh squeezed" real juice options
| so... Yes?
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I find that Costco in store generally has stuff that
| tends to follow local consumer preferences.
|
| It is worth mentioning that Costco.com does not stock the
| same things that the physical stores sell, more-so than
| any other retailer I know of. And different stores have a
| lot of latitude in what they stock.
|
| My nearest store has tons of things like sugar free
| sodas, pro-biotic soda, kombucha, no sugar added juices,
| and juice shots, etc... It might just be the local Costco
| catering to their market.
| noveltyaccount wrote:
| To build on the Costco analogy: for any given product
| category they typically only have three specific options:
| good, better, best. I could tell Costco bot that I need AA
| batteries and it would ask me if I prefer Duracell, Kirkland
| brand, or cheapest. I trust that either of them will be
| plenty good, so I would say cheapest.
|
| Amazon has a vastly different experience with thousands of
| indistinguishable Chinese knockoffs. I can only ask Alexa for
| a very specific product, otherwise I don't trust what I'll
| get. I use Alexa to add products to my cart, which serves as
| a reminder that I need to do a little more shopping from my
| phone or PC.
| jprete wrote:
| To add to your point, one can't even pick out a brand-name
| product directly from Amazon's website and be sure of
| getting the real thing.
| wnc3141 wrote:
| That's been an issue with ordering consumer electronics.
| I don't know if the item is refurbished, returned,or
| endorsed by the manufacturer warranty. I basically only
| order through the manufacturer or best buy these days.
| sambaumann wrote:
| Even when amazon shows that you're on the manufacturer
| store, it still may not be genuine. I bought an intel
| wifi card off what looked like the official intel store
| on amazon, but it turns out that it was an out of
| production model sold by a third party, but amazon showed
| that it was "Intel". Very confusing and frustrating if
| you don't know what to look for beforehand.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Does Best Buy not resell returns?
| gortok wrote:
| I ordered automated cat feeders and had bought the "honey
| guaridan [sic]" which is a Chinese knockoff when I
| thought I was buying "HoneyGuardian" brand automated cat
| feeders.
|
| This is blatant behavior on the part of sellers and
| Amazon turns a blind-eye to it.
|
| I didn't learn my lesson either.
|
| I ordered seat covers, and what came was a misspelled
| Chinese knockoff brand instead of the name brand I
| thought I was ordering.
|
| I can't trust purchases made on Amazon and I have an eye
| for detail. They got me twice. I don't know how non-
| detail oriented folks keep from it happening.
| aragonite wrote:
| > I ordered automated cat feeders and had bought the
| "honey guaridan [sic]" which is a Chinese knockoff when I
| thought I was buying "HoneyGuardian" brand automated cat
| feeders.
|
| I have to admit that's hilarious, but I'm pretty sure
| HoneyGuarDIan (correct spelling) too is a Chinese
| company, based in Shenzhen.[1] Edit: Actually I'm
| increasingly convinced HoneyGuarDIan and HoneyGuarIDan
| are the exact same company: take a closer look at the URL
| https://www.honeyguardian.com/pages/honeyguaridan-app and
| compare the second-level domain name with the last part
| of the URL pathname! Maybe it wasn't a knockoff after all
| :-D
|
| [1] Go to
| https://www.honeyguardian.com/pages/honeyguaridan-app and
| click either of the appstore links to see the company
| name (Shenzhen Hailong Zhizao, whose corporate website is
| at https://www.pdpets.com/)
| smcin wrote:
| "typosquatting"
| Rapzid wrote:
| Panasonic makes the best batteries though.
|
| But to your point, Amazon actually bait-and-switched their
| own batteries. They had basics batteries that were
| confirmed rebranded Panasonic eneloop, then changed them
| out to Chinese batteries while keeping the product page and
| reviews.
|
| Amazon did that. So good luck getting them to crack down on
| reputation fraud.
| paxys wrote:
| > If Costco produced such features in their imaginary
| product, people may use it.
|
| The question is would it make people shop _more_? If you buy
| one set of paper towels a week, and Costco rolls out a voice
| interface, would you now start ordering 2 or 3? If not, what
| return are they getting on the billions of dollars in
| additional spending?
|
| In reality people would use it for a day, go "neat", and
| switch right back to the website or app.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| > The question is would it make people shop more?
|
| No, that's not the question.
|
| The question is would it make me shop more AT COSTCO.
|
| And yes, it would make me shift some of my purchasing from
| my local grocery store to Costco. Costco is a long drive
| that's only worth it for large trips.
|
| But if I could voice order for shipping or (even better)
| delivery? My local grocery with its god-awful parking lot
| full of blind 90-year-olds stuck in reverse would be in
| serious trouble.
| paxys wrote:
| Huh, we are not talking about building a delivery network
| here. The comparison is between ordering on a website/app
| and ordering on Alexa.
| ashconnor wrote:
| The prices for items in my Amazon cart change multiple times
| per day.
|
| Until they figure out price stability for staple goods then
| nobody will use this. Hell I don't even use Subscribe and
| Save for the same reason.
| kyllo wrote:
| This. I bought toothpaste on Amazon, used it up, and the
| next time I went to buy the exact same toothpaste, the
| price had doubled.
| coliveira wrote:
| Yes, they have a dark pattern where people buy a product
| and give good reviews, so suddenly they increase the
| price to benefit from that.
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| Same, that's really why it was my sticking point for the
| post when in reality, getting the wrong item is a bigger
| issue. Lots of times I'll order something on promo only to
| have it substituted in the near future for either an
| inferior product or near double the cost.
| Twirrim wrote:
| This is the inherent problem with Amazon's support of 3rd
| party vendors through their platform, and the general lack of
| quality controls.
|
| I increasingly use specific companies for purchases, because
| I can't guarantee that what I order through Amazon will
| actually be the product I wanted, or be at the quality level
| I'd expect. It's getting to be absolutely awful.
| rendang wrote:
| This is interesting because you often hear Amazon treats
| its 3rd party sellers poorly - perhaps they are driving
| away the quality sellers?
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Yeah I've largely migrated my purchases off of Amazon for
| exactly this reason.
|
| Checking now, I placed 83 orders last year. I've placed 3
| so far this year.
| swatcoder wrote:
| > I always want to see a page with the product details and
| price before I click "buy". Reducing the number of clicks is
| not going to make me change my decision.
|
| 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
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| This was exactly my problem with the dash buttons, and with
| Amazon's recurring order system.
|
| And I'm not certain, but I believe that sellers game this
| system- you can see certain things that make sense to order
| on a recurring schedule have unconscionable prices. Once you
| have a certain threshold of recurring orders, why not
| increase the price 10x? Especially because Amazon puts so
| many dark patterns in the way of a user canceling a
| "subscription".
| ghaff wrote:
| I just reordered something I order fairly frequently today.
| The price is pretty predictable but, yes, I like to just
| double-check it hasn't doubled in price. Not a big deal to
| order every few months and confirm it's still what I want
| to order at the right price as opposed to just putting it
| on an out of sight, out of mind subscription.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Blind ordering only made sense when Amazon customer service
| was top notch. That ended when Amazon started having
| profitable quarters and started Day Two.
|
| Now I have to be paranoid about checking product details like
| if there are 3rd party sellers using FBA which potentially
| signals fakes. There's no longer blind trust in Amazon for a
| lot of customers. I can't just mindlessly buy stuff with the
| hope that Amazon customer service can take care of anything
| going wrong like they did years ago.
| fantasybuilder wrote:
| I can't come up with a single item that I would blind
| order. At most, I could ask Alexa to add an item to a
| shopping list and then verify the list and place the order
| myself.
| usrusr wrote:
| I could come up with a few. And they are all sold
| exclusively by IKEA.
|
| Never occurred to me before that vertical integration can
| be a positive factor in consumer trust. Usually I see
| myself girly in the camp of "oh noes! Sooner or later
| they will use it against us!"
| subsaharancoder wrote:
| I put baby diapers on recurring order every X weeks, it
| just worked, and Amazon would inform me that there was an
| upcoming order and give me the time to either move the
| date or cancel it. Super convenient for working parents!
| maccard wrote:
| I would love to order a bunch of things - toilet paper,
| kitchen paper, toothpaste, mayonnaise, sriracha, foil,
| dishwasher and laundry tabs. Anything that isn't a weekly
| purchase that I find myself out of when I want to use it.
|
| The problem isn't that I don't want to blind order it,
| it's that I don't trust blind ordering it from Amazon.
| delecti wrote:
| Yeah, this is the more salient detail.
|
| I would consider (something equivalent to) what Amazon
| envisions if it was products from my local grocery store, at
| the prices of that specific store. But Amazon? I can't trust
| they'll be any of: in stock, with the exact same product, at
| basically the same price.
| crazygringo wrote:
| This a million times.
|
| I swear I will never understand why Amazon's supply,
| organization, and pricing for household goods is such a
| disaster.
|
| Because their experience for mainstream books is mostly
| perfectly fine -- there's a single listing for each book, and
| the price doesn't change much, just some discount from list.
| It works.
|
| But for things like paper towels or Tide or whatever, it's
| utter chaos. Multiple listings for the same item, sizes and
| quantities that mysteriously move from one listing to
| another, prices that vary 10x or more...
|
| It's utterly baffling to me why Amazon created this consumer-
| hostile nightmare. I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon, but
| everything home and toiletries I buy from Target online,
| simply because the listings and prices are totally
| consistent. Even though I have Prime! I don't understand why
| Amazon doesn't figure out that Prime consumers like me _buy
| from Target instead_ because Amazon 's household supplies
| listings are such utter unpredictable garbage, while Target
| just works like a normal store.
| booi wrote:
| It's ridiculous that I have to have a spreadsheet with
| pricing information and links for household goods just to
| spot check and make sure I'm getting the actual price per
| quantity that I want due to the multiple dynamic listings
| that change every day nightmare.
|
| Don't ask how many times I receive more or less than I
| thought I would or something came in 10 packages of 3
| instead of 1 30x package.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Vote for politicians that campaign on consumer protection
| legislation.
|
| Here in Europe, it's been mandatory to show a price
| related to a reasonable common base point (e.g. liter,
| kilogram, piece, usage-unit for laundry detergent)
| adjacent to the actual product's price for many years
| now. You can go and use 1/10/100 grams/milliliters though
| for small scale packages where that is reasonably common
| (e.g. spices), and that's it.
|
| Fun fact, that piece of legislation significantly
| contributed to Brexit propaganda, the campaign was based
| on "the EU wants to take away our
| pints/stones/pounds/whatnot".
| zyberzero wrote:
| Fun fact: my local store uses different units for the
| comparisons. Not that you can choose from that many
| different units, but for example brand A corn flakes
| comparison price is price/serving while brand B corn
| flakes is compared by price/kg. Sure, the serving is
| based on weight but I still need to do some math to
| figure out which one is cheaper :)
|
| This is one of the biggest food chains in Sweden.
| linsomniac wrote:
| Here in the US with Amazon it will usually give you a
| price per quantity, though that can vary between "each",
| "oz", etc... The real issue being complained about is
| that there may be 10 listings in Amazon for "Tide Pods",
| so if you say to Alexa "Order Tide Pods" you aren't sure
| what you'll get, what quantity, or what price.
|
| Amazon _REALLY_ needs to do some product normalization.
|
| It is true that if you go into a grocery store, you're
| literally presented with a whole aisle of detergent, and
| even if you are as the section for "Tide Pods" there may
| be quite a few options (larger/smaller, "stain blaster",
| "fresh", whatever), you very quickly get a pretty good
| view of what the options are and their differences, plus
| prices and things like "on sale" cards.
|
| The shopping experience is absolutely inferior with
| Amazon for things for which there are many alike
| products.
|
| One could even imagine some sort of mega page for "slim
| network cables" where you'd select the standard and color
| and length and be presented with a few options. They try
| this with things like screws, though I can't believe they
| have one option for star drive 5/8" wood screws...
| ryandrake wrote:
| Even if you search for the exact item, including the
| brand name and the size, you get pages and pages of
| choices, many of them just wrong.
|
| I just did a search for "sprayway glass cleaner 19 oz 1
| pack". This contains all the information you need to
| uniquely identify a single product. Brand, Product, Size,
| Quantity. Yet Amazon returns _3 pages of crap_ ,
| including Wrong Brand, Wrong Product, Wrong Size, and
| Wrong Quantity. I can't make the query any more specific,
| Amazon, what the hell is your problem? This query should
| return one and only one result.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Pretty sure that's Amazon selling your query results, not
| a failure in search algorithm.
| maccard wrote:
| The big difference with a store is that if tide pods
| should be ~$8 for a pack, the dtore is incredibly
| unlikely to have one pack of tide pods on the shelf for
| $70
| tgma wrote:
| Nah. Just choose to buy the way you wish to. Vote with
| your money and don't artificially restrict where there's
| zero issues. Everything works out in the end.
|
| I'd much rather transact in the US than Europe. The
| entire retail customer experience and return policy is
| unmatched. The last thing I want is for some government
| regulation to make it suck like Europe.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The last thing I want is for some government regulation
| to make it suck like Europe.
|
| Are you aware that Europe has a _mandatory_ 2 year
| minimum warranty period on consumer purchases? A
| mandatory 14-days no-questions-asked return window on all
| purchases?
|
| In the US, AFAIK you're fully at the mercy of whatever
| the vendor so graciously offers you.
|
| [1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopp
| ing/gua...
| tgma wrote:
| Yes I am aware and I stand by my statement. Have you
| actually returned stuff to stores over there?
|
| I have returned half eaten cake that I did not like the
| taste to Costco and didn't have to face a weird looking
| employee. No law and regulation necessary just
| capitalism.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| This is fun.
|
| The person you've replied to has stated a concrete (what
| they perceive to be) benefit of consumer protection
| regulation. One that doesn't seem to limit choice at all,
| but rather improves visibility.
|
| I'm also inserting my own personal experience here. The
| country I live in, which isn't in Europe, has similar
| regulation in place.
|
| In response you're throwing around some vague notion of
| "freedom" and vague implication of a "better experience"
| without really explaining how mandatory unit pricing is a
| bad thing for you as a consumer.
|
| Has John Gruber got you all upset about the EU?
|
| I'm currently booking a trip to the US and the consumer
| experience is absolutely terrible. Tax-exclusive
| "totals"? Resort fees? Give me a break.
|
| It sounds like the US consumer experience is more aligned
| to your obvious libertarian ideology, and that's the end
| of it.
| tgma wrote:
| Can you think of any downside of that proposal at all?
|
| Tax inclusive total means government can screw the
| business and the end user and hide behind the tax
| inclusive price tag. Jack up the tax it seems the
| business is doing it.
| ghaff wrote:
| It'd not even that I care much about small deviations--I
| just don't trust that something really crazy won't happen
| if I put it on autopilot. If I walk into Walmart and grab
| a big armful of Bounty I'm fairly confident things will
| be fine.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I'm in the process of moving. I thought maybe I'd give
| Prime Day a try and send some soaps ahead to my new
| place.
|
| In my last apartment, I used Method's pump-dispenser
| laundry detergent and their basil-scented kitchen hand
| soap.
|
| Amazon is selling the laundry detergent for $75 and the
| hand soap for $15. I'm guessing Method discontinued the
| SKUs I was used to, and there's some leftover stock on
| Amazon with crazy prices.
| polynomial wrote:
| This creates the opportunity for a start up offering such
| spreadsheet management as a service to flourish in the
| ecosystem whether or not Amazon ends up acquiring them.
| Yes I am being facetious. (obvi)
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| Unfortunately, another commenter is indicating that
| they've done just that. This is truly some darkest
| timeline stuff.
| juxtaposicion wrote:
| We're building that spreadsheet as a product. I'd love to
| show you. I'd message you a private link to a prototype
| but you have no contact info on your profile. If you are
| interested, can you email or DM me using my profile info?
| jaggederest wrote:
| You also don't have an email on your profile, for what
| it's worth. I don't use Twitter. I'd be interested in
| something like this as well.
| juxtaposicion wrote:
| Oh, thanks! I added my email to my profile. Look forward
| to replying to your note!
| supportengineer wrote:
| Prescription drugs have something called "NDC number" (
| National Drug Codes ). What we need is NDC numbers but
| for consumer goods.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| European Article number
| doubled112 wrote:
| Like a UPC?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Are UPCs stable at scale and over time? It's been a
| minute since I was in retail, but I remember there being
| a bunch of asterisk-but's around them.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Ironically, this is probably why books don't suffer the
| same problem. ISBNs
| _alex_ wrote:
| Third party sellers make up most of the inventory. Means
| Amazon has less inventory risk, but the buyer experience is
| terrible. Really unfortunate.
| LiquidPolymer wrote:
| I gave up trying to purchase Nikon OEM batteries on Amazon.
| It's easy on B&H, but I cannot (or do not know how to)
| exclude the hundreds of cheaper knock-off batteries that
| are inferior in every measure. I also tried to get an OEM
| battery grip for my Nikon D850 - but again near impossible
| on Amazon. This grip is $380 from Nikon, and its possible
| to get a knock-off for $29. Why get the original? It
| increases the camera's max frame rate for stills. it is
| also far more durable.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I'd argue their app is so good and reliable that these other
| things don't add enough to make them worth it. If I see
| something is out or I need something it only takes a second
| to buy it on my phone.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Some things Amazon did since the introduction of Alexa have
| definitely worked at cross purposes to a sightless buying
| experience as well. _Maybe_ I would order a product sight
| unseen from 2014 era Amazon, but in the intervening time Amazon
| has been flooded by cheap knock offs including Amazon 's own
| Amazon Basics. Amazon has also started placing promoted
| products higher in search results. As a result, even searching
| for a specific brand name doesn't yield the results you would
| expect.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| I don't think they tried hard to create an experience user
| would like. Their shopping features is honestly very lacking.
|
| 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.
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| I'm not sure there is a good means for buying over voice
| only, and I'd argue it's only possible to know now that users
| overwhelmingly prefer digitally handling the product (title,
| pictures, description, reviews) before making even repeat
| purchases. Similarly, I'm not sure Amazon could convert
| consumers to a tablet-based purchasing device like they
| envisioned Alexa; we all have smart phones and tablets
| already.
| simonw wrote:
| > I always want to see a page with the product details and
| price before I click "buy".
|
| 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?
| elpakal wrote:
| > Make it a value add in my life and I wouldn't mind paying a
| subscription fee for it.
|
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| Well it's still a speaker, and will still play music. If they
| bundle in a GPT-5 level personal assistant I can definitely
| see a ton of people paying the added fee.
| dawnerd wrote:
| It's also why subscribe and save ends up being me cancelling or
| skipping every month. The prices are not stable enough to
| blindly trust. One month its cheap, next month it'll be 300%
| increase.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It would be better if Alexa could have shopping lists. "Alexa
| how much is a box of tide pods? .... Okay, order me the large
| box with free shipping please." That would be pretty useful.
| And any subscription good you've already signed up for would be
| pretty helpful as it would be nice to manage them with a voice
| interface. But I don't know if it generates billions in
| revenue.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I run my fire tv with it. Context-free search - even if I'm in
| a video I can just ask "Alexa show me that new movie with
| Michael Baldwin" or whatever and it goes to the search screen
| with results. No fooling with a remote, at all.
|
| So for that I appreciate Alexa.
| jeffh wrote:
| > If they want to salvage Alexa, they need to forget shopping
| and start doubling down on the smart home and assistant
| experience [...] and I wouldn't mind paying a subscription fee
| for it
|
| 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.
| hibikir wrote:
| I'd be happy ordering with a voice assistant if it's at least
| as good as I am at deciding good alternatives. Imagine I want
| to, say, purchase garbage bags, because I am out. It's not
| exactly a complicated product, and yet I might care about
| whether it has any smell reduction agents, whether the bag is
| tough enough, the size, and possible alternatives that are
| either a bit better, or quite a bit cheaper. Either the agent
| understands my preferences, or I am not going to trust it.
|
| 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
| ghaff wrote:
| On the other hand, I have--for better or worse--default
| brands for most of that stuff and I go to a Walmart every six
| months and load up my cart.
| playingalong wrote:
| The system could simply default to whatever I picked the
| latest (or same brand).
| ern wrote:
| I would consider using Alexa to buy things if it understood
| what I wanted. It rarely does. Asking it to list subscriptions,
| for example doesn't work. Trying to get it to set up anything
| beyond a simple timer is a hit-and-miss affair.
| ern wrote:
| I would consider using Alexa to buy things if it understood
| what I wanted. It rarely does. Asking it to list subscriptions,
| for example doesn't work. Trying to get it to set up anything
| beyond a simple timer is a hit-and-miss affair.
|
| 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.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| > The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product
| that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were
| always an afterthought. How convenient would it be if people
| could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were
| in their home and the order got magically processed? That demo
| definitely got applause from a boardroom full of execs.
|
| 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.
| crorella wrote:
| This, plus the fact many of the products sold by Amazon now are
| fakes and low quality items. I almost never order from Amazon
| now and doing it blindly via Alexa is not an option.
| mikehollinger wrote:
| >If they want to salvage Alexa, they need to forget shopping
| and start doubling down on the smart home and assistant
| experience.
|
| 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...
| ghaff wrote:
| I have basically zero interest in "smart home" features and
| I'm not sure what "assistant experience" means at the current
| level of technology. It certainly isn't an admin with a
| roughly middle of the pack level of savvy much less the
| actual exec admin that I would want.
| deanCommie wrote:
| What do you need Alexa to do with your smart home that it can't
| do today? https://www.amazon.com/alexa-smart-
| home/b?ie=UTF8&node=21442...
|
| 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.
| Domenic_S wrote:
| It just sucks. I get non-deterministic reactions from "turn
| off the lights" vs "turn off every light" vs "all lights
| off".. one of those phrases eventually works. I had to set up
| a custom action ("goodnight") to reliably do the thing.
|
| If they focused on getting voice control _for home
| automation_ perfect, it could be a real winner.
| swozey wrote:
| With how much Amazon pricing fluctuates I definitely want to
| see the page before I buy.
|
| y protein powder that was, I think $50s pre-2020 is now $80ish.
| Sigh. Goodbye Hydrowhey, back to the chalky stuff.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa
| order me Tide Pods"... The problem is that consumers don't
| behave like that._
|
| A bigger problem is their kids _do_.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| I would not give Amazon control over my home. That's too far. I
| want a company that focuses on security.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| What I want is a truly personal assistant (which LLM's should
| be capable of). Alexa can barely get me answers to google-able
| questions.
|
| 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.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| Why is that so simple? I've had online bank accounts,
| calendars and emails for many years now, but I still can't do
| a "text search" across all of them. Isn't the LLM the easy
| part? How do you link and connect all the different systems
| you interact with?
| pj_mukh wrote:
| I mean at its core operating a bank account, an email and a
| calendar is just running operations on a browser.
|
| LLM's can do that (ex: https://www.skyvern.com or
| https://www.gumloop.com).
|
| edit: Though more generally, I can see a future where all
| these operations are essentially different functions in a
| function calling system.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| Letting an LLM use my banking login is now one of my
| wordt nightmarrs. Thanks, i hate it.
| switch007 wrote:
| Ahh the Dash buttons. I remember those. I remember thinking I'm
| not a gambling man at all, so what use would that buttons be?
| Will I pay PS5 or PS10 today? No thanks lol.
|
| Amazon had low trust back then. It's even worse now
| Rapzid wrote:
| 99% of my Alexa usage is:
|
| 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.
| julianeon wrote:
| The other really big use case - actually the majority for me!
| - is telling Alexa to add things to shopping lists. I have
| one list I always check when I'm at a physical store or
| preparing for curbside shopping.
| ghaff wrote:
| And I use a steno pad for that.
| julianeon wrote:
| In my family a few people add things to the list, from
| different rooms even, which would be impractical if we
| were passing a single steno pad around.
| ghaff wrote:
| Computer calendars and shopping lists probably make more
| sense as more people are involved. I just keep a single
| list.
| Rapzid wrote:
| That sounds handy, how do you get the list back out?
| julianeon wrote:
| You check the app on your phone. I use Alexa to add
| things to the list and the app to cross them off.
| anthomtb wrote:
| > people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever
| they were in their home and the order got magically
| processed...
|
| > 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.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| My parents are more computer-literate than the average late-
| fifty-somethings, but they aren't HN techies by any means.
| Having lived with them for about a year, I'd break down their
| Alexa usage like this:
|
| ~90% timers
|
| ~8% weather
|
| ~2% putting items in a shopping list
|
| And I don't recall them ever buying anything via Alexa that
| they wouldn't have bought on Amazon some other way.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| > If they want to salvage Alexa, they need to forget shopping
| and start doubling down on the smart home and assistant
| experience.
|
| 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.
| julianeon wrote:
| > Alexa can set timers and tell me the weather, and...that's
| basically it.
|
| 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
| markbnj wrote:
| >> Alexa can set timers and tell me the weather, and...that's
| basically it.
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| That sounds pretty right. I'll ask for an odd conversion, the
| weather forecast, set an alarm for the one in my bedroom, but
| that's about it.
| leros wrote:
| I actually used my Alexa like that all the time.
|
| "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.
| Jaauthor wrote:
| I mean, yeah - but take a step back from there. Why is this
| technology _only_ for commerce? Why is technology only useful
| if it can be economically exploited? That 's a deeper issue and
| not one you can get a ChatGPT-generated answer to. Culturally,
| we're hostage to psychopath companies and the investors that
| love them. Nobody in a hedge fund somewhere is going "hey
| folks, we should add a 'this makes people's lives better'
| quadrant to our analyst sheets?"
|
| 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.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Or, and I know this is a radical idea, but I think it could
| work, sell the hardware for more than it costs to make.
|
| 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.
| burnte wrote:
| > The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. This is
| also why Amazon's Dash buttons failed.
|
| 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.
| aiauthoritydev wrote:
| Products need to evolve with time. Gmail is not same as 0 years
| ago even though core functionality is email. Same for Google
| maps, Same for Amazon Prime etc. But Alexa has not really
| evolved.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Gmail would be more or less just as successful if it were
| exactly the same as 10 years ago
| francisofascii wrote:
| We pay $179 a year for Amazon music. We use Alexa all the time to
| play music. How is that not a huge revenue success? It sounds
| like they are not properly factoring that in as a downstream
| impact.
| simonw wrote:
| It takes a LOT of $179/year subscriptions to pay the salaries
| of 10,000 engineers. Especially since a lot of that
| subscription revenue for music will go to licensing the
| content.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| That's not a revenue problem, that's an over-hiring useless
| employees problem.
| Balgair wrote:
| "All problems are people problems"
|
| -Gerald Wineberg
| kevingadd wrote:
| In general music is a business you go into if you want to
| lose money. At Amazon's size they can probably negotiate
| better deals than smaller companies can, but it's still a
| painful business to be in.
| graton wrote:
| For $168/year you could get YouTube Premium, which comes with
| YouTube music and ad-free YouTube (not counting ads inside the
| videos done by the content creator).
| ghaff wrote:
| Or as part of an Apple deal that comes with other stuff you
| may want. The music subscriptions are all pretty much the
| same unless you have very niche requirements.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| can you stream youtube music on the alexa?
| pchristensen wrote:
| Music rights aren't cheap. Just ask Spotify.
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| The problem with Alexa is that they overpriced it and pocketed
| the money instead of using the cost of the machine to build
| something that performed most of its commands on device. Instead,
| it's reliant on the cloud which is 100% a problem they created.
| That being said, their "losses" are all just tax write offs that
| they have to pay themselves, so Amazon doesn't lose a dime.
| StressedDev wrote:
| It's better to pay taxes on profits than to lose money and not
| pay takes. The reason is very simple. If you pay taxes, you
| keep the portion of money you made. If you lose the money, you
| have nothing. Note, I suspect that the Alexa business is worth
| nothing, and I bet the shareholders would rather have the money
| spent on Alexa instead of having the Alexa business.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Imagine putting one of these in your home. Whenever I visit
| family/friends with one, I unplug it asap. 95% of people just use
| it to play a song or start a timer. Big waste.
| Theodores wrote:
| One problem with Alexa and all other voice assistants is that the
| older people that have money are precisely the people that detest
| voice assistants.
|
| So how do you make money?
| devilbunny wrote:
| Older people are not the ones who detest voice assistants (my
| in-laws love them). It's the middle-aged (me) who grew up using
| computers and don't trust something that's always listening.
| S0y wrote:
| >Customers actually used Echo mostly for free apps such as
| setting alarms and checking the weather. "We worried we've hired
| 10,000 people and we've built a smart timer," said a former
| senior employee.
|
| That's actually really funny to read. Just last night I was
| watching my brother cook and he asked Alexa to set a timer (It's
| pretty much the only thing he uses it for...) I jokingly said
| "You know, that's a really expensive timer."
| philodelta wrote:
| don't get me wrong, it is silly, but also being able to set a
| timer without touching anything with your gross cooking hands
| is unironically a wonderful feature.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| I like my Apple Watch for other reasons, but do have to admit
| that raising it to my face to set a timer or do a quick unit
| conversion while cooking is by far the most common "active"
| way I use it. I also use voice control a lot for music when
| I'm wearing gloves while working with greasy bicycle parts or
| when gardening.
|
| An entire product segment for when your hands are dirty...
| emj wrote:
| How does one need unit conversion while cooking? Sometimes
| I need how many grams is 1 dl of flour/oats (60g/35g) but I
| memorized that the second time, maybe if you are doing
| larger portions.
| snapcaster wrote:
| You answered your own question in the comment? If you
| require two instances to memorize it that means you
| needed unit conversion twice in cooking
| crazygringo wrote:
| Exactly. And given that there are probably 50 different
| common conversions you'll encounter in cooking, both
| between imperial units and between imperial and metric,
| not to mention common weight-vs-volume conversions of
| things like flour, good luck in not only memorizing them
| all but _getting them exactly perfectly right every
| single time_.
|
| You mess up a single conversion and your finished baked
| goods go straight in the trash.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Some people might just not want to take the time to math
| it out while they've got something time-sensitive on the
| stove. I feel like your comment doesn't really serve a
| purpose other than to put other people down. Congrats on
| your memory and math prowess but not everyone in the
| world has the same brain as you.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Everyone who routinely tries to cook American or British
| recipes, for example. It's all "tablespoons", "cups",
| "ounces", "fluid ounces" (whoever thought about naming
| that one deserves a special place in hell...) and
| whatnot.
|
| And since that stuff isn't metric, orders-of-magnitude
| conversions (e.g. scaling a recipe up/down) become
| needlessly more complex as well.
| tomn wrote:
| > American or British recipes
|
| American or _old_ British recipes; ours are all metric
| now.
|
| The exception is perhaps teaspoons/tablespoons, but those
| are trivial metric values (5ml and 15ml), so easy enough
| to scale and convert if you don't have the right
| measuring spoon handy.
| ljf wrote:
| We are a 'Google home mini' house - it's the same for us -
| timers/alarms, Spotify, radio, occasional weather checks, and
| even more rarely asking it to answer a question like 'how far
| away is the moon' - while we are eating dinner together.
|
| For all these purposes it is great not to get a phone out,
| and the speaker is far better than my phone speaker for
| sound.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| I feel like there's an unmet market opportunity here for a
| physical timer that is voice activated without a connection
| to the internet.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Make it a microwave feature (I use the convenient timer on
| the microwave far more frequently than any other) and I
| could see it really taking off.
| harmmonica wrote:
| agree with this and we're an alexa household, which I don't
| love, but we tried a homepod and friggin' siri was (still
| is?) shockingly inept when it specifically came to setting
| multiple timers, adjusting timer duration, cancelling timers,
| etc. it feels pretty dumb having Alexa and all the potential
| snooping just to set timers and for an inferior Spotify-
| playing experience (sound quality of the ones we have are not
| good), but... here we are.
|
| that said, considering how much we rely on alexa for timers
| and spotify, what I really want is a homepod for the sound
| quality (if apple and Spotify would just start playing nice),
| privacy (yes, in a world with a lack of privacy I actually
| believe apple is basically our best bet given the ecosystem
| choices) and mostly for the potential of apple intelligence,
| which, if it worked as well as chatgpt today in "conversing"
| with you I'd be over the moon about.
|
| does anyone else primarily interact w chatgpt via voice? it
| really does seem incredible how you can start with a
| superficial question about a topic and then keep digging
| down. it's replaced a lot of my information-seeking google
| searches, which I have never used voice with, with a voice
| app that I would use endlessly if I didn't have to open the
| chatgpt app and tap on the microphone button (that may seem
| crazy, but think of all the time you spend away from your
| phone, or like others are saying, with something in your
| hands, where you voice is the ui).
|
| p.s. can't leave this comment without saying that, yes, I
| worry about the privacy implications of all of this stuff
| daily, but guess I'm dumb enough that I still use all of
| these privacy-invading devices
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| > gross cooking hands
|
| I cook a lot and totally get this feeling, but honestly your
| cooking hands probably aren't gross. And if they are you're
| probably doing something wrong, in which case some cooking
| classes will be both very enjoyable and eliminate the
| problem.
| HaZeust wrote:
| A cooking class won't eliminate the raw meat on your bare
| hand
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| Both of them? At the time where you need a timer?
| kevinsundar wrote:
| You've never had to set a timer while cutting meat (which
| inherently takes two hands)?
| scotteric wrote:
| You should be washing your hands immediately after
| handling raw meat.
| zymhan wrote:
| Either you don't cook much, or you have a much different
| definition of "gross" than most people.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| A thread about Alexa is a good place to criticize a
| stranger's cooking technique?
| cushychicken wrote:
| Being able to have multiple, named timers that you can set
| hands free is my favorite feature of Alexa! I'm convinced
| that better timing for all of my recipe steps has made me a
| better cook and helped me make better food for the last few
| years.
| mdavidn wrote:
| This is my primary use case for Siri too. I use my watch or a
| HomePod to start named timers in parallel. Voice is also great
| for adding items to a grocery list, one shared by the entire
| family in Apple's Reminders app. e.g. When I notice the olive
| oil is running low, I can make note without washing my hands.
| chasd00 wrote:
| my Alexa use cases are timer, music, news (sorta), weather. I
| also use "routines" for pranks form time to time.
|
| 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.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| I really enjoy this joke,
|
| "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
| kps wrote:
| It's a very old joke, by computing standards.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expensive_Tape_Recorder
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| haha TIL of the origin! thanks!
| sundvor wrote:
| Tesla: Really bloody expensive outside thermometer.
|
| (Via the app climate page, my Model 3 is in an detached-
| adjacent garage where zero attempt was made to insulate the
| gaps)
| dmazzoni wrote:
| That's the thing, it's not very expensive! It's actually a
| pretty excellent price for what it does well. That's why so
| many people bought them and continue to use them.
| pants2 wrote:
| That's partly because all voice assistants have a feature
| discoverability problem. People have generally no idea what it
| can do unless they ask. And if new features are added, they
| won't know about those either. But at the bare minimum you know
| it has timers and weather.
| conradfr wrote:
| But a phone does the same thing.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I got an Alexa as a gift and never opened it
|
| 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.
| nox101 wrote:
| I already have that, it's my phone. I don't need a second
| device to respond to "Set a timer"
| crazygringo wrote:
| I do.
|
| If my phone's in my pocket, it won't hear. If it's in my bag,
| it won't hear.
|
| Or it sets the timer, but then a kid grabs my phone for
| something and leaves it upstairs were I won't hear it.
|
| There's something to be said for a voice-activated timer in
| your kitchen that is always in your kitchen and never leaves
| your kitchen.
| flatline wrote:
| I use it as a timer and to control a couple smart lights. About
| 1 in 5 times I use it as a basic utility, it attempts to sell
| me something. I have nearly stopped using it altogether as a
| result of this unwanted behavior.
|
| 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.
| julianeon wrote:
| The other really good use case, which I'm surprised to see more
| people don't use, is to use it to immediately add items to a
| shopping list when you're out (which doesn't auto-buy, to be
| clear).
|
| 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.
| alexathrowawa9 wrote:
| Throwaway here but I used to work in Alexa org at Amazon and was
| amazed by how big the org was (thousands and thousands of people)
| considering it doesn't seem to be a big revenue generator
|
| I remember constantly hearing about projects other teams were
| working on thinking "why would anyone use that" or "how would
| that ever make money"
|
| Just trying to shoehorn alexa into as many domains as possible
|
| It was like empire building at its finest
|
| I would joke that the canary tests were the biggest customer for
| a lot of services
|
| And the way amazon works with SOA even what seems like a small
| feature ends up being a couple services, a pizza team of 10 devs
| + SDM, the overhead is huge
|
| Back when it was announced alexa org was being hit harder by
| layoffs that did not surprise me
| spike021 wrote:
| I once heard about a feature dogfooding invite that was sent
| out specifically for people with babies because they wanted to
| use Alexa always-listening to activate when a baby was crying
| and automatically order diapers or something ridiculous like
| that.
| alexathrowawa9 wrote:
| I remember getting that invite!
|
| You could use "baby crying detected" as an automation trigger
| bagels wrote:
| Doesn't even make sense. Babies cry all the time for a
| multitude of reasons, none of which are informed by how many
| diapers are in the house.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Yeah and given how often we get it wrong as parents,
| imagine the absolute dumpster fire it would be to have a
| voice assistant get it 10x as wrong.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Babies just need to learn to cry only when the diapers in
| the garage are running low. How hard could that be?
| sa46 wrote:
| Interestingly, there is an app, Chatterbaby [1], that
| claims to detect why a baby is crying based on the acoustic
| features of the cry. I've used it with middling success.
|
| That'd be a neat integration: "Alexa, why is my baby
| crying?"
|
| [1]: https://www.chatterbaby.org/pages/
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41390-019-0592-4
| UberFly wrote:
| "Your baby is crying because it doesn't like the brand of
| formula you purchase. We recommend Amazon Basics!"
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| "We recommend you try UBQTLONR this time!"
| Balgair wrote:
| Hey, I gotta ask a few questions here, given this oportunity:
|
| 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?
| alexathrowawa9 wrote:
| > Any good stories?
|
| One time I walked into a dark room with like 50 test devices
| to get something and somehow accidentally triggered them and
| all 50 started talking at the same time
|
| Was both hilarious and creepy
| deepfriedrice wrote:
| > Just trying to shoehorn alexa into as many domains as
| possible
|
| 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.
| brazzy wrote:
| I guess that's what happens when you're generating absurd
| amounts of revenue and want to "reinvest" it all: anything that
| even vaguely smells of "innovation" gets money thrown at it
| like crazy, and you end up incentivizing bullshitting.
| bobnamob wrote:
| > I would joke that the canary tests were the biggest customer
| for a lot of services
|
| This is true for a surprising number of amzn/aws products
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| I've interviewed many people on Alexa before. From what I
| gather, its just a giant switch statement, and each individual
| "path" takes a bunch of effort to support and there are
| thousands of paths for music, ordering, commands, etc. It's
| peak AI == if statement architecture.
| venkat223 wrote:
| They have data for AI skimming and training the ai agents. But
| with voice tracking issues inside homes may not yield structured
| data
| mgraupner wrote:
| Speaking of Alexa: Can anyone explain the thought process behind
| making it possible to change the volume in small increments via
| buttons, but not via voice command (only in 10% increments)? I
| only use it as an internet radio player for background music and
| it's extremely annoying that it can't do that.
| jjfoooo4 wrote:
| You can set the volume to any number from 1-10
| mgraupner wrote:
| Which correlates to 10% and 100%. I want for example 15%,
| which works with the buttons.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| If you say, "volume 15 percent" it will set it to 15%.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| I thought each button press on the volume buttons
| corresponded to + or -10%? I always thought Alexa's volume
| only had 10 states (11 counting zero) regardless of buttons
| or voice commands? Maybe it depends on the device, I have
| the spherical echo.
| jetrink wrote:
| Can't you just ask it to set the volume to a specific volume as
| a percentage, like 38%? This works on Google Home. In the
| Google ecosystem, it also _usually_ works if you ask it to
| raise the volume by a small increment like 5%. (Other times,
| this sets the volume to 5%.) I think you also used to be able
| to ask the device to raise the volume 'a bit' or 'a lot', for
| 5% or 20% respectively, but that stopped working a long time
| ago and I haven't tried recently.
|
| If neither of these work, then I am very frustrated on your
| behalf.
| mgraupner wrote:
| Unfortunately it only knows integers and rounds 15% up to 20%
| and 12% down to 10%.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| If you say, "volume 15 percent" it will set it to 15%.
| mgraupner wrote:
| Not working for me, as I said in another comment, asking it
| to set it to 15% will set it to 20%.
| ysacfanboi wrote:
| Voice command on volume modulation used to work. Then Video,
| Music, Shopping and Home Automation built a "revamped" Alexa
| system and broke it. This is also why people struggle to turn
| of alarms, why Alexa Pay broke, among many other service-side
| performance degradations.
|
| Pretty cringe, the number of people who were promoted for this.
|
| 10/10 not worth working for Amazon.
| stacktrust wrote:
| If it's not doing what you want, you can remap any arbitrary
| voice command to a precise Volume setting in 1% increments, via
| a custom Routine.
| superfrank wrote:
| Years ago, my wife did some contracting work for a team
| responsible for the voice assistant at one of the major tech
| companies. Her role required her to work with the directors and
| VPs and she came home one day to tell me how one of them laid out
| their grand vision for the product and was talking about how, not
| only will people use these things to buy every day items, but one
| day people will be making major purchases like cars with these
| things.
|
| I can't speak for the Alexa team, but if the execs at Amazon are
| anywhere close to that delusional, it's no wonder these things
| are falling short of expectations.
|
| The problem IMO is trust. These devices get simple commands like,
| "turn off the lights" wrong on a semi-regular basis. No one is
| going to trust Alexa to buy the right thing until they're
| confident that it consistently understands them correctly and
| currently the error rate is just too high. Even if it does
| understand me, I don't trust Amazon to send me a quality product.
| fantasybuilder wrote:
| I think the issue of trust is a part of it, but not the most
| crippling when it comes to purchases. It's not that I don't
| trust Alexa is that I have no idea how to communicate what I
| need. There are thousands of options for any product - so which
| one should Alexa pick? How can I tell what sliced bread I want
| it to order without seeing the available options and prices?..
| superfrank wrote:
| That's fair. For me at least, I see those as two sides of the
| same coin.
|
| If I tell my wife, "buy me toilet paper", I trust that she
| knows enough about me to pick a quality product. I don't need
| to specify details because I trust her.
|
| If I tell Amazon, "buy me toilet paper", I wouldn't be at all
| surprised if I got some garbage product from a brand I've
| never heard of and like you said, it isn't clear what I could
| do to get Amazon to do something different.
| anandlovelin wrote:
| I was really pissed when Alexa tried to sell me "Despicable me"
| movie as the first thing when I announced good morning. Never
| tried that again.
| Minor49er wrote:
| What were you expecting it to do instead?
|
| Edit: Why the downvotes? This is a legitimate question
| tonymet wrote:
| if they integrate LLMs and build true conversational capabilities
| they could charge a premium for therapeutic conversations
| fantasybuilder wrote:
| I love the idea but the only way I would ever use a product
| like that is if it's fully local and open source. No company is
| getting my "therapeutic conversations".
| atum47 wrote:
| I'm doing my part.
|
| Every time I search for a product I filter out Amazon from the
| results.
| meroes wrote:
| I'm doing mine by never having bought a voice assistant
| amelius wrote:
| Same here. I voted with my feet.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| They should sell them all to openAI to become the voice interface
| of GPTx.
| fantasybuilder wrote:
| Amazon is surely working on an LLM competitor integrated into
| their ecosystem. Even using Llama 3.1 would suffice.
| advisedwang wrote:
| The article says as much:
|
| > A group was assembled ... to create a way to charge
| customers a fee for Alexa. Code-named "Banyan," like the
| tree, the group has been working to create a product called
| "Remarkable Alexa," that would be built on an entirely new
| technology stack and have more capabilities ... It will also
| incorporate generative artificial intelligence more than the
| current Echo experience. Bezos hinted at a new version of
| Alexa in a podcast interview in December. "Alexa is about to
| get a lot smarter," he told the host.
| rrwo wrote:
| The last thing anyone wants a smart home assistant for is to
| purchase stuff.
|
| Controlling lights, heating and cooling, play music, find
| information, yes. But shopping is unexciting and low on the list.
| ddawson wrote:
| https://www.wsj.com/tech/amazon-alexa-devices-echo-losses-st...
| farceSpherule wrote:
| They made similar stupid decisions with the flood of their Amazon
| branded products that they were ripping off from Amazon sellers.
|
| The issue with Amazon is that they have so much money, they can
| afford to make dumb decisions.
| textlapse wrote:
| If Amazon (and Google and Apple) couldn't figure out how to
| monetize a voice/chat 'app' after a decade of plowing money into
| it, how does the whole LLM market come to fruition?
|
| Genuinely curious as I see a similar trend: there is definite
| consumer interest, but just like 'kitchen timers on Alexa' what
| if the LLMs main use case is simply to generate funny memes and
| the most basic RAG?
|
| How does this manifest into a trillion or gazillion dollar
| market? What am I missing?
|
| (I am discounting GH Copilot/Cody and the like as they are an
| extension of intellisense/ dev oriented workflows which really is
| a fantastic use case)
| mvanbaak wrote:
| hype, marketing, investors spent millions so lets make it
| happen.
|
| It feels a lot like the whole crypto thing
| monero-xmr wrote:
| But bitcoin and ethereum are near all time highs, while Alexa
| is laying everyone off and AI has no paying customers...
| LordKeren wrote:
| This is by design-- the rhetoric around crypto was
| specifically tailored to emulate all the new-exciting-tech
| talking points in an attempt to get new people to buy in to
| the market and prop up the next rug pull.
|
| Every new culturally significant tech is going to sound like
| crypto from now on. And ultimately I think it is too easy to
| cynically look at all tech hype through the lens of crypto.
|
| I think it is pretty fair to say that LLMs have already
| achieved several magnitudes more real use cases than crypto
| ever did.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > how does the whole LLM market come to fruition?
|
| 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.
| loire280 wrote:
| Except according to Graeber those jobs exist because leaders,
| companies, and society _like_ having lots of employees doing
| this work for various reasons and we all more or less tacitly
| agree that the output of those jobs is useless and only
| exists because the last 50 years of productivity gains mean
| there isn 't enough real work to keep everyone busy for 40+
| hours 50 weeks a year.
| conradfr wrote:
| They are useful for customer service.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| When? I've used various customer service chat bots and they
| just point me to the knowledge base. They can't take any
| actions. You have to talk to a human for that, and if I just
| wanted info I wouldn't have contacted support in the first
| place.
| conradfr wrote:
| The vast majority of CS contacts don't require action, and
| are not through a chat bot.
|
| You don't even need to automate all the steps, an IA is
| perfectly capable of fetching the customer data, delivery
| info etc and write a decent reply, then a human agent can
| discard it, improve it or send it as written.
| rty32 wrote:
| Here is the thing. Most of the time I call customer service
| because the app/website does not provide the information or
| the ability to do certain things, and I need to talk to a
| human to get things explained or get something done. And more
| than a few times customer service agents don't know what they
| are doing or are just talking nonsense, and I need to
| escalate to a manager.
|
| You think you can trust an LLM to make decisions for
| something like resetting password or closing an account?
| nox101 wrote:
| > how does the whole LLM market come to fruition?
|
| 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?
| textlapse wrote:
| Interesting. How much would one have to pay you to stop using
| it?
|
| Wondering what the use cases are (replace Google? Stack
| Overflow? etc).
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| I'd have to be paid probably at least $200/mo to stop using
| LLMs, they are a massive productivity boost for new
| projects and can replace google for simple things. As an
| example of replacing google (since I was writing C++ today
| and I haven't used it in ages):
|
| me: is there an issue with passing "hello" to std::string
|
| claude: Passing "hello" to a function expecting std::string
| is actually not an issue. C++ allows implicit conversion
| from string literals (like "hello") to std::string objects.
| This conversion is possible because std::string has a
| constructor that accepts a const char*, which is the type
| of string literals in C++.
|
| If I type this question into google, I get this:
|
| > some_function(std::string{"hello, world"}); is completely
| safe, as long as the function doesn't preserve the
| string_view for later use. The temporary std::string is
| destroyed at the end of this full-expression (roughly
| speaking, at this ; ), so it's destroyed after the function
| returns.
|
| which doesn't really answer my question
|
| As an example of simple project: I wanted to make an app
| with swiftUI, and I was able to just describe it to claude
| and have it give me the basic outlines of the app, and then
| improve it by iteratively asking claude for changes. Since
| I try to understand the output, this lead to me learning
| Swift and SwiftUI very quickly while also having a
| functional app within a few minutes.
| southwesterly wrote:
| Product looking for a service.
| browningstreet wrote:
| I use mine to start music. I have different commands for music
| when I work, when I cook, when I'm getting ready for a run. About
| 4-5 commands in total.
|
| Sometimes I have to change the "whole house" Command because it
| doesn't like where the word 'group' was. Sometimes it wants it
| first, other times.. after.
|
| I use commands like "music time". I have for years. And sometimes
| it won't understand my command request. I have to say it 5 times
| and then it works. I've looked for words it's likely to
| understand better than others. I also have "sleep time". Usually,
| when I've said it enough times for Alexa to understand, I'm no
| longer calm enough for sleep.
|
| I also can't believe you can ask it to start an album and go to
| the second song. Seems like a basic request.
| ysacfanboi wrote:
| Please realize, for this to be true, there must be another
| incentive. I.e., Alexa devices are government-subsidized spyware.
|
| What are the advantages for Amazon?
|
| - Mic-popping, Camera-popping, mobile phone backdoor access,
| network sniffing, device activity monitoring across all
| wifi/bluetooth connected networks.
|
| - Sidewalk (remember this? Amazon "borrows" your wifi, for
| free...)
|
| Unplug Alexa devices. Remove the Alexa app from your phone, and
| factory reset. Otherwise you remain complicit in Amazon
| surveillance of you and everyone that interacts with you.
| 6ak74rfy wrote:
| Sure. What do I do with all my devices that don't turn them
| into e-waste?
|
| I've looked for projects but haven't found anything yet.
| advisedwang wrote:
| I'm not saying that smart home stuff isn't amazing for the
| surveillance state... but I am quite happy to believe a company
| just made a strategy mistake, no behind-the-scenes government
| deals needed. We've seen companies build expensive products
| without monetization plans, especially when they are worried
| about getting cut-out by a compentitor many times.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| My kids use Alexa for listening to (spotify) music more than
| anything else. If Alexa could convince my kids that Amazon music
| is better than Spotify, then I'd pay for amazon music instead of
| spotify. So far, there hasn't been any serious attempt at getting
| us to embrace amazon music.
|
| If I was amazon, it would look like this. "Oh hey, you want to
| play Taylor Swift? Well, it looks like your brother is playing
| spotify on a different Alexa device. Would you like to play
| Taylor Swift using Amazon Music?" No ads. No bullshit. For 1
| month.
|
| After that month, then it would say "It looks like your Brother
| is playing music on a different Alexa device. Sign up for Amazon
| music to play up to 5 different streams on alexa and elsewhere."
| (something that is possible, but more challenging to do with
| spotify on alexa devices).
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| The Alexa leadership at Amazon has been a waste since day 1 (pun
| intended).
|
| Shopping with Alexa is easy to fix!
|
| Reorder what I want, not the most popular item. When I say, order
| diapers, use the last brand and size that I ordered. That would
| actually be useful! Who wants to say "get my diapers" and get a
| random box of random sized diapers? Do the Alexa leadership even
| use their own product?
|
| Distinguish regular orders from one-offs. I _never_ want a one-
| off order from a category I don 't regularly order from. But I
| very much want to be able to reup regular orders.
|
| Let me order incrementally from Fresh as I cook. I would order
| from Fresh more often if I could just say "Alexa, we're out of
| red wine vinegar". Again, I have to know 100% that it would get
| the item that I want, not some random item. Then, let me say,
| "Ok, pull the trigger on all of the pending fresh orders Sat at
| noon".
|
| Voice identification is a must. I don't want random people
| ordering. And I don't want my kids ordering. The first thing
| everyone with kids does is turn off ordering. The fact that they
| can't sort this out is crazy!
|
| Their half-hearted attempt to create an ecosystem was completely
| wasted. No one wants to use a wake word, then another command
| word, and another word, just to access a skill. They need to
| figure out how to route to skills automatically based on what
| someone is asking. This isn't rocket science they're just
| incompetent.
|
| Also, has anyone seen the website to install new skills? It could
| win an award for worst UI.
|
| Skills can also charge you while using them! The skills store is
| full of 1 star reviews from people saying they got charged
| against their will for months in some cases.
|
| It feels like the Alexa team just doesn't talk to consumers.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I unplugged my Echo years ago. I was getting 0 value out of it.
| Talking to your computer is an amusing novelty, for a while. But
| at the end of the day I prefer forms and buttons. I can open the
| Wikipedia app on my phone and type "Llama" just as fast as I can
| say "Hey Siri", wait for the beep, "tell me about Llamas", all
| without disrupting anyone else around me. Plus, I get the full
| Wikipedia article and not just a summary.
| alexa_throwaway wrote:
| Throwaway here.
|
| I'm the CEO of a fast-growing AI startup. Alex asked to meet with
| us about a year ago (when we were about 1/10th the size), and
| after asking us to prepare lots of materials, they indicated they
| wanted to buy us or invest in us. People warned us not to talk to
| them because they have a reputation for gathering technical
| detail, and then trying to copy it rather than striking a deal.
| Our software could have _radically accelerated and improved_ the
| Alexa experience basically overnight.
|
| At one point in the meeting, the head of Alexa's M&A/investment
| team said "tell us how much you think you're worth." I threw out
| a number, and he laughed and left the room.
|
| Today we're valued at more than that number and Alexa's core
| experience hasn't changed in the past year. They haven't been
| able to copy us. The Alexa leadership team has some hubris IMO.
| stacktrust wrote:
| Practical Alexa use cases for elderly: 1.
| Schedule/ask cooker to start, then stop after fixed time.
| 2. Blind person can control microwave with voice. 3. Blind
| person navigation via prompts from multiple Echo devices.
| 4. Blind person notification when doors opened or motion
| detected. 5. Blind person item locator, via Tile + Alexa.
| 6. On-demand instructions for caregivers. 7. On-demand
| physiotherapy exercise instructions. 8. On-demand streaming
| radio and podcasts. 9. TV voice control via Logitech
| Harmony or Android Fire TV. 10. Call PSTN phones via VOIP
| (10 number limit). 11. Zigbee devices with USA-based cloud
| security (Echo4 is a hub) 12. Arm/disarm Blink cameras.
| 13. AC/heat control via temperature sensor in Echo devices.
| 14. Announce notifications from Google Calendar.
|
| If Amazon would open up their devices and/or APIs, much much more
| is possible. There are some workarounds via HomeAssistant.
| ynac wrote:
| I haven't used Amazon since about 2000 (kung fu movies for my
| brother-in-law). My current process for shopping online cascades
| from the actual manufacturer / source, eBay, specialized
| clearinghouse (e.g. www.Biblio.com for books) and as a last
| resort, Costco / WalMart - these last two often have hard to find
| items I need quickly (or so I think - I'm looking at you Black
| Cuman powder).
|
| All in all, I shop stress free in this decision tree. Oddly happy
| with eBay over the years. It may be because of their lack of new
| features and old UI that keeps things simple and quick / it just
| works. Yes, there are oddball things about each of these, but
| compared to AMZN...it's all bliss.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-07-24 23:01 UTC)