Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10B this year

The point about the vast majority of Alexa interactions being trivial and repeated things that aren&#x27;t monetizable rings true with me.<p>When I&#x27;ve used one it&#x27;s been for exactly two useful things: timers while cooking and weather, and one frivilous thing: jokes. It&#x27;s valuable enough for those things to be honest, given the purchase price, but yeah there is no feasible way to make ongoing revenue from them.<p>I just can&#x27;t think of anything else I want to use one for, if I could I probably would have.

This feels like one of those things where if they had just charged more per device and tried to make it as useful&#x2F;unobtrusive as possible it would have been better than trying to use it as an ad&#x2F;purchase machine and subsidize the hardware. I like my Echo and would have paid more for it, especially if it wasn&#x27;t always trying to sell me things via Amazon Shopping and I trusted it to not record me for advertising.

I threw out my Alexa. I tried, I really tried, but it’s just too fucking annoying.<p>Wake up, and then: “Alexa, good morning, what’s the weather like?”<p>Forecast follows, which is good, but then she unfailingly launches into DID YOU ALSO KNOW you can use the Alexa app on your phone to do this and that etc etc. it’s unbelievable. Why am I being served ads from an assistant in the first place? Why can’t you just tell me the temperatures and shut up?<p>Anyhow, I just ask Siri now, which does what I actually want, every single time.

Is it me or is it a bit embarrassing to use voice commands? Not just echo but also my phone and car.

$10 billion seems like a lot a money for an 8 year old product that hasn’t changed much.

&gt; Google Assistant at 81.5 million users, Apple&#x27;s Siri at 77.6 million, and Alexa at 71.6 million<p>That&#x27;s a lot of scale before figuring out there&#x27;s no way to profit!

Any voice assistant should be a feature and not an independent product. I&#x27;ve never used Alexa but I use Siri daily for exactly two things - turning on&#x2F;off my lights when I get home&#x2F;leave and checking the weather. If Siri at any points tried to sell or advertise me anything I would simply stop using it. The problem with voice assistants is that they are too dependent on other devices for people to pay more money for them. Additionally, if you own a smartphone you already own one therefore you don&#x27;t need to spend money on it at all.

Looks like MS saw this coming a mile away when they pulled back on Cortana. What was MS seeing that Amazon didn&#x27;t, or was it pure luck?

&gt;&quot;We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices.&quot;<p>Lack of vehicle integration is the colossal failure nobody is talking about. Selling ads for brick and mortar locations you are predicted to pass (e.g. coupons for food and fuel) are completely untapped revenue streams. Imagine Alexa parsing your shopping list after analyzing your GPS route. It announces, before you leave, where to stop for the largest discounts and where to stop for the fastest pickups. Basically, they need to add &quot;navigation&quot; on top of &quot;assistant&quot;. Alexa as the &quot;driver&#x27;s navigation assistant&quot; would be an overnight success.

Besides my phone, my echo is the only device I use every day. It&#x27;s so useful that I would pay a monthly fee to use it. I suspect the must have subscription is coming as a way to monetarize it. I hope it won&#x27;t be too high.

How is it a &quot;colossal failure&quot;? Amazon has tens of millions of these devices which are a 24&#x2F;7 microphone, and with the wireless transceivers even more data-collection capabilities.<p>THe data is worth more than $10-billion alone.

I have a Google Home, and the only things I ask it to do are to turn on my TV when I’ve lost the remote, play music on my HiFi via a Chromecast Audio (which they don’t sell anymore) and play different radio stations.

Maybe the silver lining here is that we can finally get a good &quot;home assistant&quot; that doesn&#x27;t phone home. I think there&#x27;s huge potential with these types of devices, but they&#x27;re also really creepy; they &quot;accidentally&quot; send recordings back to the server surprisingly often.<p>Maybe someone could build an assistant with trust at its core, everything happening <i>on</i> the device, and a hacker enabling ethos. These devices are a far cry from the independence we get from the old-fashioned desktop computer.

5 years ago, Amazon saw the sales figures and thought their smart speaker business was the bee&#x27;s knees. The Alexa org had thousands of open roles.<p>There was all kinds of talk about how smartspeakers would be the next smartphones. They went all in.<p>There may be an important lesson here, to understand the limits of your markets. They could have made a killing if they had taken the win and developed it slowly, rather than doubling down and letting their bet ride.

It is hard to sell ads in voice&#x2F;interactive interfaces so the scale does not matter, product has to be fantastic. But weather&#x2F;music&#x2F;timer is not revolutionary.<p>It may have a shot with a more clever AI that can do cool stuff, that you would be ready to pay $5&#x2F;mo for.

It&#x27;s been a build in progress since 2007 at least, according to public web scraper logs.<p>15 years without a stable, usable product makes this unsurprising.