I think the real problem was that the product just wasn't what people imagined it would be.<p>When Alexa was first announced in 2014, I thought, "OK, right now it can only do simple things like play a song on Spotify or tell you the weather. But they're going to iterate rapidly, and in 10 years we'll be talking to it like a computer from <i>Star Trek</i>."<p>The rapid progress of GPT-3 and friends seemed to confirm this.<p>But here we are in 2022 and... we're nowhere near <i>Star Trek</i>, nor even GPT-3-ish levels of conversation. There seemed to be a failure of imagination: you <i>wanted</i> some cool sci-fi stuff, maybe shared storytelling like AI Dungeon[0]. But you <i>got</i> triggers for home automation, which 90% of people don't care about.<p>[0] <a href="https://gpt3demo.com/apps/aidungeon-io" rel="nofollow">https://gpt3demo.com/apps/aidungeon-io</a>
This makes sense based on my experiences with Alexa.<p>Starting in the last two years it has increasingly, and aggressively, started “advertising” skills and products following a voice request. So much so that I began looking into alternative voice engines.<p>Now I know why it was ramping up so quickly.
I for one just don't like stuff I have the feeling I can't control. With those intelligent loudspeaker and microphone devices I have always the feeling I need to cut the power supply to switch it really of.
Meta and Amazon missed out on smartphones as a platform but both succeeded in other areas (VR headsets and Alexa). I guess it's apparent now that they both overpaid to get there.<p>I use my Google Nest hub to watch YouTube which shows me ads. I think Amazon should've doubled down on the Echo Show and video content delivery (they do own twitch after all). The real money for platforms like Alexa/echo is content delivery, associated ad revenue, and replacing your telephone -- not as a medium to buy more shit on Amazon. And I think all of this could've been achieved with a 10000+ person division.
Just a reminder for people that are looking for open source alternative that there is the Mark II that Mycroft is developing for years:<p><a href="https://mycroft.ai/product/mark-ii/" rel="nofollow">https://mycroft.ai/product/mark-ii/</a>
I’m actually considering getting rid of my devices. I just want to play a song, not be constantly pestered about Amazon Music Unlimited and other crap.