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.
> 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
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.
The crazy thing to me is that you’re confused about this. These companies make huge margin fooling consumers who aren’t paying attention. Nearly all the consumers I know are barely conscious, the first promoted link on Amazon is the one they buy. Losing customers like you who actually inspect the listed price is a pittance to the Amazon machine.
How much time have you spent in physical stores observing the physically listed price per volume labels? These things are all labeled specifically to fool people who are alive but not conscious. Again, we are just a rounding error to these monoliths
It's absurd that you have to become a being of continuous price comparison in order to be considered conscious. This is predatory behaviour loaded with decades of psychological research around manipulation strategies to increase purchases (e.g. price anchoring, physical positioning on shelves, store layout).
These things only work because of innate human biases and cognitive defects. The idea that anyone less than a pure rational being lacks consciousness is just silly. There's a huge power imbalance which is systemically leveraged against the consumer and it's more useful to see this as a designed aspect of the system rather than the collective individual failures of "nearly all the consumers"
PS: Even the conscious consumers loose, as they spend a ton of time at minimum wage scrolling prices for goods and services. Basically, yes, you get pay less, but for that you have to work 24/7 in the mine-defusing sweatshop.
Feels like winning to me. Feeds into my hunter-gatherer complex and every cent I keep from them gives me great satisfaction. Though, you are right, it does get old but then my defiant and vengeful nature kicks me right back into.
I know it doesn’t matter to them, it matters to me and it’s a win and winners keep winning, right?
It’s a slog to do the “which one of these is least a ripoff” calculation, at the grocery store or online.
I try to do the calculation nonetheless. But every time I just need to buy some ordinary staple, I’m up against the Relentless Spirit of Pure Deception, who attempts an ever evolving and always brand new form of trickery, at every engagement.
Sometimes, I simply make the $1.00 donation to P&G or whoever just to avoid having to think of strategies to outsmart. This too feels terrible and exhausting in a different way.
> It’s a slog to do the “which one of these is least a ripoff” calculation, at the grocery store
Where I live price labels must carry the per liter or the per kilo price too. It's printed with a smaller font size but it's visible and it's often the only price I look at.
The unit price labels here in the US are hilariously messed up. The items you want to compare will be say, a pack of 6 granola bars or a 10 pack. The unit prices will be like:
#1: $0.37 / ounce
#2: $6.50 / pound
or even:
#3: $1.82 / each (a price per item)
This will even be common within the same exact brand too. The stores seem so bad at picking a consistent unit for a product category that it seems malicious, but it stretches my belief that they have the time to get it so wrong intentionally.
Sure but multiplying by ten to get the price per kilo shouldn't be the most complicated thing for even those folks that aren't math savy. It means to move the decimal point (or comma) one place to the right IIRC.
If you had to convert from arms to legs or feet like in certain areas of the world, that might be much harder, of course.
I prefer prices per 100g because I mostly buy food that's under one kilo. I'm sure they show prices per 100g just to make them look cheaper but in my case I actually prefer it this way.
It doesn't even matter what unit is chosen as long as it is kept the same across.
Comparing Smarties to M&Ms is super easy if both have to use price per pound, price per oz, price per g or price per kg. Who cares if the price per kg would be $0.031.as long as I can see it's $0.028 for the other for the same unit without doing math.
Comparable unit-pricing: A mandate brought to you by the European Union. You know, this allegedly evil entity that always hassles with the free market and annoys global companies. /s
Whilst I am waiting for my number in a chemist, I kill time by finding the highest price per litre. It's normally some anti-aging cream at well over €1000 / l.
It's malicious compliance. They probably wouldn't show anything other than the pack price if they had a choice, so there's something forcing them to show unit prices. So given that they have to show them anyway, they have an opportunity to inject profitable confusion.
"They probably wouldn't show anything other than the pack price if they had a choice"
The absolute dream would be to price it like health care. You only find out the price months or years after buying the item and multiple phone calls to clear up errors. And for one person it would be 50 cents and for another person 200 dollars.
I remember that around year 2000 a coworker from England told me that petrol pumps changed the prices from pounds per gallon to pounds per liter when the cost crossed the one pound mark. There is some malice in that too. Something like that could be the origin of using different units in those USA shops, not to cross some psychological threshold.
It's been a long time since I went to the UK so I can't say if petrol is really sold by the liters there. Maybe somebody from the UK could confirm or refute the tale. Anyway it's probably way more than one pound per liter now.
The UK switched from selling petrol in gallons to litres in the 1980s. I think I just about recall petrol prices suddenly changing dramatically when I was fairly young - I used to help my Dad keep records of how much fuel we'd bought at what price. I'd write down the figures in the book while he went to pay (it was always self-service) so I must have been old enough to be left alone for 5 minutes!
This Energy Institute statistical series - https://knowledge.energyinst.org/search/record?id=58969 - says that their records changed from "new pence per gallon" to "new pence per litre" at the start of 1989. That seems late for my recollection.
Looking back at historical data from https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/oil-and-..., it appears that the average price for "4 star" petrol (97 RON) crossed the £1 per gallon threshold some time in 1979 (Table 4.1.3, and multiply by 4.54609). I'm not old enough to remember that!
By 1989, prices were at 168.8 pence per litre (i.e. £1.68). So I think the story about the change being because it had gone over £1 per gallon has to be a myth. However, retailers certainly weren't complaining about the price displayed being less than one quarter of what it had been! In contrast, they were much less happy about prices per kilogram being more than twice the price per pound (weight).
Prices crossed £1 per litre for 'Premium Unleaded' (95 RON) in November 2007. They fell back below this level in November 2008 but went back up over it in June 2009.
The change-over was actually driven by the technology at the time - namely the outdoor road-facing price advertising panels, as well as many of the pump displays.
Simply - they were only designed to show 2 numbers so when the price-per-gallon exceeded 99 pence many had to stick a static "1" in front, and many point-of-sale terminals and cash registers couldn't handle it.
Since there are ~4.5 litres in a British gallon displaying pence-per-litre brought the displayed prices back to 2 digits and allowed for a gradual transition to 3 and 4 digit displays.
And yes, at the time the switch from pence-per-gallon to pence-per-litre occurred some retailers did take advantage to 'add some profit margin' but it wasn't universal.
Gallons are larger than litres, so in Canada you'll never find anything sold by the gallon. However, pounds are smaller than kilograms, so produce at the grocery store is commonly advertised with per-pound price, with the per-kilogram in small print.
It is, and everything is required to be sold in metric units. Except for things like pipe fittings and screw sizes, but even those have to show the metric somewhere.
There's an effort to switch car efficiency from mpg (higher is better) to "l/100km" (smaller is better), because the latter has more intuitive scaling as well as being properly metric.
There were definitely people complaining about the price hike when the currency changed, but that was back in 1971 so it's only boomers who'll bring it up.
Some pipes are in imperial units in Italy too. For example, from my memories of few days ago at a store: we have metric series of rigid PVC water pipes (32 mm, 40 mm, 50 mm) and imperial series for the flexible ones used for watering plants and grass. I remember sizes of 1/2" 3/4" 5/8" 1" 1 1/4". But there are also metric ones that more or less can fit with some of the imperial ones. Of course there are two series of adapters, hoses, etc.
Gas pipes are imperial. I think they never changed to metric because of safety concerns or because the number of meters sold is lower than water pipes (gas pipes last forever) and it's not worth splitting the market in two. But it's just my suppositions.
And I see there is a similar but less catchily-worded concept, "Hubbard's corollary" from 2020 mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for Hanlon's razor... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
I actually thought I made it up, and almost called it "Nerdponx's Razor", but I thought it would be arrogant to name it after myself. Hubbard can take the credit!
Oh, they have plenty of time to do it. We have created lots of MBAs...people who want to take advantage of their education, and to do so they want to squeeze a little more profit. And they're bored. And they need to stand out from their coworkers. Therefore 'price per net weight' becomes a thing. And Surge pricing.
(Peanutbutter M&Ms are an egregious example...the share bag price varies 20% depending on the calendar, as does Hilshire Farm Kielbasa...which now comes in 14 oz packages...which is a choice and means a family of 4 needs to buy two of them now to make a meal.)
it has to be intentional. almost any two products that you might want to compare are always using different units. haagan Daaz pints are always shown with different units than the larger haagan daaz.
They have to do that in the UK too, but unfortunately the law doesn't seem to standardise the unit for these comparison values(or it does and is ignored).
If you have two packs of coke cans next to each other, and one gives you a price per 100ml, and the other per can, it doesn't help that much(yes you could multiply the value per 100ml by around 3x, but at a glance the difference isn't obvious).
My store has a few different brands of coconut milk. Some of the unit prices are per pound, while others are per quart. I make the approximation that coconut milk has the same density as water, which is two pounds per quart. The unit prices are all odd three digits numbers. It's a pain.
You could have one person who works in an office somewhere who's responsible for itemizing inventory for the whole grocery chain. They could solve this problem (maybe automatically!) with a spreadsheet. They could also solve the problem of tomatillos not being registered in the self-checkout catalog. But what is that person's salary paying for in the company's eyes?
To be fair, maybe the real explanation is "lots of stuff, shit happens." And it's only a factor of two (for watery goods, anyway).
Where I live, labels get these price per amount labels...
But they don't keep the denominator consistent, even across the same category of product.
So I get to compare a price/oz, versus a price/lb versus a price/serving and all the while, I contemplate why nobody's interested in burning the whole store down.
My mum has told me about her shopping habits in the 70s, she would have a list of everything they needed, she would walk around the first shop writing all the prices down. She would walk around the second shop buying the items that were cheaper, then return to the first shop to buy what was cheaper there.
We will all end up having to walk around with an AI shopping assistant that can do all these pricing calculations and comparisons for us.-
(Other than biases, them AI's being "mindless" might be an advantage here ...)
PS. Until we go so so multimodal that they start to be influenced by packaging size, bright colors, rounding, and big breasts.-
PSS. Heh. Perhaps the ultimate Turing test is when them AI's start to be influenced by marketing, and shady practices thereof.-
If a company makes something like Meta's ray-ban smart glasses but with the one function of being an AI shopping assistant (preferably offline), it would instantly make the case for why AI is good for the world. I think it could quickly become an unicorn startup, if it can deliver.
The company would have to make a compelling case of not selling itself to brands, and I am not sure such a company exists. Maybe we need an open source project, but it will be constant battle as with ad blockers.
The base features we need are:
1) price comparison: scan all unit prices of products on the shelves, compare and covert, then use AR to superimpose the comparison charts/prices.
2) filter by feature: e.g. food restrictions (allergy, halal, etc.), flavors, etc.
3) ad block: for the real world. Block misleading prices (3 for the price of 2, etc.), to avoid being primed with biased triggers in our choices.
I was excited about the brief wave of startup grocery stores that were selling zero/minimally packaged staple goods, like “The Rounds.” But it seems like they’re just not able to hit a level of scale to where they can be price competitive with the sneaky dark patterned stores.
If by "these companies" you mean the third party suppliers, then sure, but Amazon obviously loses business when a customer can't trust the branded microphone cylinder they bought to place the desired order for them and make the program profitable. This is especially evident in the failure of Amazon's bid over the past decade to replace the big box supermarkets and grocers: clearly customers aren't pleased enough with the service quality to select it over physically picking their "essential goods" themselves, even when their probable prime subscription partially went to setting the system up. What good does Amazon get in hamstringing its own ability to acquire new markets in exchange for enriching someone else? The argument that they've arrived here out of some rational, intentional economic calculation that they can but choose not to change is clearly penny wise but pound foolish.
If you look at the list of top online stores after Amazon, many are brands with also physical stores. One would assume they are less shammy. I know if I go to a regular supermarket here, great effort has been spent by the buyers and the organization to ensure that everything is actually of decent quality. Even the cheapest alternatives. That cost of course I then have to pay in the price of the products.
I prefer not to buy things from unknown sellers which I can get from known sources. Sometimes you need something special like a car spare part that has local markup of 300% so then online is worth the risk (not safety critical parts).
I just don't understand the situation where a person decides to buy a regular product from an unknown seller, especially from a system that incentivizes something that is not in the interest of the buyer.
On the other hand, hearing you refer to the people you’ve met as “consumers” before criticizing them sounds pretty dehumanizing.
It leaves me wondering if you were able to connect with them on a personal level at all, or if perhaps you were also “barely conscious” during these interactions.
Yeah, but I don't know anyone that will just blindly order stuff from Amazon using Alexa like this. They all know that they have no idea what item will be shipped or what price they may be charged. So I'd argue that they are leaving money on the table from potential sales.
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.
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".
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...
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.
Their search result page is just a ranking of whatever they predict will sell best based on your query (based on units, not dollars). It’s stupidly simlistic, actually: if we sell more for a given search term because we’re advertising hard on that search term, our organic ranking for that term will rise almost immediately. So in your case, what’s going on is that basically other people who search with the same term end up buying other products. Thats bad for you, but perhaps its actually good for them?
But think about the corollary where places like McMasterCarr have exact products in known quantities, types and breakdowns because they used to be a catalogue. I will go to McMaster 9/10 times because it's just easy to find exactly what I want and so they get my money.
Amazon seems hostile to this very idea, that I know what I want, will spend 15% more to have it tomorrow and will not by the random stuff it smashes in the search results because I know what I want.
Oh I get it. I actually think there’s a huge opportunity in online retail to gate off categories and brands that are already in, say, Walmart. Then do the Amazon algorithmic model for everything else.
I think you’re missing how crucial Amazon’s algorithmic model has been as a way to connect shoppers with 2 day delivery for an unimaginably long tail of products. We sell a technical product that would be at home on McMaster. On the 2nd largest retailer in the US. It’s incomprehensible that our products would ever be in Target or Walmart stores. Yet we have access to the same customer base at the same place where they can buy Tide. Amazon’s purely algorithmic approach is what allows companies like us to do product/market discovery for them (and their customers).
Did you know that Amazon has a section that drives to compete with McMastercar? It’s somewhere in Amazon business they have parts and stuff and it’s just a horrible shit show.
my guess is sheer incompetency hidden by sales volume.
at some point they had the idea of translating the search to categories and showing alternatives. it got both unmaintained and other products teams added their own self interest on top of the algo and now you have the worst search on the planet which nobody have the political power to fix because it touches everyone revenue, even if for worse
It's not stupidly simplistic. It's ads. Random no names bid for keywords to be placed on those pages, the higher the better. Good luck discerning actual ads from the real listings.
For the sponsored returns to the search query, sure. But for the rest, isn't that the fuzzy search crapping the bed in the face of our expectations?
When I specify what I want I want the search to return what I searched for, not a lot of kinda similar junk. I've tried to explain the concept of fuzzy search to my girlfriend a few times and she still gets annoyed when a search for "24"x24" shadow box" returns a whole bevy of standard picture frames at an utterly random spread of sizes, for example.
Or is fuzzy search a convenient excuse for "we consider sellers who advertise with Amazon and subscribe to more of our seller services a valuable factor in search rankings"?
Fundamentally, Amazon seems to have a problem with not understanding priority. It's especially terrible at associating numbers with units. While I have no access to how Amazon actually works I think it's just counting matches and thus "sprayway glass cleaner 19 oz 1 pack" and "sprayway glass cleaner 1 oz 19 pack" would score equally and "bogus glass cleaner 19 oz 1 pack" would score higher than "sprayway glass cleaner 19 ounce". Remember, most quantity 1 items will not say so in the description, "1 pack" is asking for trouble.
I think the only real fix here would be for Amazon to separate out brand, product, size (or sizes in a few cases) and quantity. And the parser needs to attach numbers to the following word if that word is a unit word.
While I've never done it at any real scale I have done a routine that predicts what's related to what. It required giving it a fair understanding of the data (for example, Xabcde is probably related to X despite the distance between them) to get it to quit spewing out whoppers. It's hard even in my case where I could afford to run the test against all reasonable candidates. Amazon simply can't do that. (My routine runs in length * length * table size. You simply do not implement anything that even resembles O(n^3) at scale.)
Trying your search, I'm not seeing a pile of crap.
First hit differs from your search term only in 2 vs 1. I believe Amazon doesn't consider numbers as as much of a mismatch as other things.
The third hit is obviously what you want, but it doesn't have the commas and the unit is "1 pack (packaging may vary)". Apparently that makes it score slightly less. Going down the page I find it in 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 packs, fresh scent vs unscented and there's also "blue". There's one clear typo of 15 oz, and you get a bunch of things where it's a multi-pack bundled with some other cleaning item.
Farther on down I start seeing different sizes and related products. Is there any harm to it displaying lesser matches farther on down??
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
In some cases the retail store just doesn't list the price and the store owner may just come up with a highly marked-up price when asked. 10x would be very rare though indeed.
What store doesn't list prices? Isn't that illegal in most places? In my country even the tiniest ancient village stores I've been to have prices listed on items (sometimes simple labels attached to the items, such as "10", but still there).
You will see 10 X but it’s in places where it’s considered emergency go to the 24 hour gas station and look at the price of diapers or butt wipes compared to Walmart.
“Try” being the key word, because it is useless. It maybe could work if vendors populated the metadata correctly, but they don’t, and amazon put far too many similar categories into it, so you can’t actually filter on most of the parameters without filtering out most of the options you wanted to see, or selecting dozens of options.
You can get burned real bad by this if the specific product SKU gets discontinued and the price spikes 10x because now they're called Tide Pods Original.
It seems the simplest form of code for software that says the last time you ordered tide pods it was $10 for 1 pound now it is $10 for 1/10 of a pound. Do you want to continue?
The kind of organization that is politically capable of creating something like this could successfully run Alexa the way Amazon is trying to run it too. Or in a lot of different ways.
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 :)
Incredibly common in the US as well to use different units per item. All the better because our garbage measuring system can make unit switches significantly trickier.
I had to do a double take a few weeks ago when I found the price/unit to be drastically different for the name brand to the store brand of something, until I realized they strategically switched the <unit> (# to oz I think it was) to make the store brand look astronomically cheaper instead of just slightly cheaper.
"Serving" is the biggest vector for manipulation ever. They can make up whatever they want. I still remember looking at a small bag of potato chips that had 3 servings.
> 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.
That's pretty irrelevant to the discussion at hand. It's about blind ordering without worrying about the price.
No one complained that Amazon was hiding prices or making price per quantity hard to discover.
Even with the legislation you suggest, wild price swings are still entirely legal.
The point was that they're _not_ kind enough when you buy through Alex. The instant coffee you bought last month could have doubled but if you say "Alexa add [the coffee] to my cart ot just work… and if my anexcodes extrapolate at all, LOTS people use this feature.
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.
> 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.
Not sure why you're downvoted. There is material difference in prices of electronics due to whatever reason (taxes, warranties, low scale, etc) to the degree that my European friends often purchase laptops and iPhones when they travel to US.
Anytime you get something "for free", you're paying for it one way or another. No amount of legislation can change that, they might as well legislate pi=3.
They usually don't, but that only strengthens their point. People are choosing, instead of paying a European price and getting a very long warranty, to pay a cheaper US price even though they likely won't even get the benefit of our awful 1-year or 90-day warranty.
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.
How many half eaten cakes would you have to return to monetarily make up for, say, a PC or washing machine that stops working after 4 ½ years? Because you can get that device replaced or repaired in much of Europe, for free. I'm not aware of any US company that offers such a warranty window and actually keeps its word (look at crappy fridges where the company will replace one faulty unit for another with the same problem once, and then you're on your own). And even if some did, they are by far the minority. The voluntary "I'm a good brand, choose me" freebies offered by a company will almost never outmatch that mandated by regulation.
The reason is simple: the companies have a fiduciary responsibility to make as much money for shareholders as possible, and if it's marginally cheaper to shorten the warranty period (whithouth seeming out of touch with the rest of the market), the bulk will choose that. Whereas the aim of regulation is always to secure the interest of the consumer. I say "always", but there are exceptions in cases of regulatory capture, which admittedly is much of the US...
Interestingly, the particular retailer in question, actually offers at least "second year warranty" for free to products you purchase from them at no explicit additional cost, so you don't have to make a trade-off by summing all the halves of poor-tasting cakes. The point is there is a choice of retailers. You don't need the regulation hammer for everything.
So? You’re stuck with a warrantied product that you know has the same defect, unless they’ve changed things since last I saw it. What’s a two-year warranty on a product that breaks after three? The market is not fixing this particular issue. Sure you can choose another manufacturer next time but you’ve already been screwed by one. There was no need for that in the first place.
I will almost always choose to buy a product if offered at a cheaper price if I can do so by declining longer warranties, so, no, it's not "always a benefit". It's not a fairy tale. Someone has to pay for things.
You’re just being taken advantage of. At every step and every service level they are fleecing you, because they can. Think the non-warranty option saves you money? It may on the margin but your easily parted money subsidizes those that do get the warranty. And they still get screwed for the profit. You can’t win in a rigged system
That's not capitalism, that's culture. In the USA, it's very common to return products because of a change of mind and/or complain. That isn't universal.
The fact that a retailer is willing to accept it despite not being forced to is absolutely the result of capitalism. If they don't, you buy from a competitor. This is not some hypothetical. People in the US routinely choose retailers based on their service experience.
In any case, the overall retail experience is much better on west side of the Atlantic and prices are generally better too, without the need of too many "customer protection laws" so I don't think a good case is to be made to copy from a failed continent.
But, the usual case is that the major companies in the market collude to strip away these kind of offerings, as "free unconditional returns" hurts bottom line of all companies in the market. This is the real power of capitalism.
Think about it, for example the TV sector: All companies colluded to reduce the selection of TVs to "Smart" TVs only. I can't just go and buy from a competitor, because it simply does not exist!
The problem here is just the group that wants them is minuscule. Nobody wants to admit it, but the smart TVs are what people want. You can buy dumb TVs that have no smart features or smart TVs with the smart feature can be completely ignored. Vizio is good for this, but nobody wants to pay for those except commercial units.
TV companies do try adding features that go beyond dumb display panels. Ask them how that worked for 3D, which people didn't adopt. Yes most TVs are "smart" but I'm pretty sure most people won't pay much of a premium and many use something like an Apple TV instead anyway.
The premium paid is the $20-50 that the TV manufacturer gets for preinstalling shit on their smart TV.
Which is why (currently) Vizio is my doge because it just turns on with ARC and shuts off when the Apple TV does so I don’t even know it’s smart.
The stupid Samsung (praise be to the toddler, destroyer of shit tech) wouldn’t even let you switch inputs without being connected to WiFi, or if it could I couldn’t figure it out.
Is that the "usual case" really? I find it very rare actually.
You really think "Smart TV" is some collusion/conspiracy and not emergent from the market behavior? The most malicious theory I can come up with is that Smart TV makes more money for the manufacturers due to the ad opportunity, therefore they sell an inferior product to the consumer —in our minds— similar to bundling crapware in Windows laptops, but that still does not make it collusion or market distortion.
Under that theory, it just means dumb TV would have to be a comparatively more expensive product and I am willing to bet even the nerds who care about dumb TV will be buying the smart one, airgap it, and connect an Apple TV. Effectively no one would be paying even $50 more for dumb version of a TV.
In reality, I believe the average Joe & Jill actually strongly prefer Smart TV.
How will the government enforcing a minimum bar on return timelines lead to a worse experience at stores that already exceed those metrics? It might be unnecessary, but how would it hurt?
Various negative consequences but off the top of my head:
- Any regulation needs to be written, read, analyzed, made sure to comply with, defend in court, etc. which costs money.
- I might want to be very generous and voluntarily take back items from my legit customers because I find out it was good for business, but also have mechanisms in place to prevent abuse by a small minority of bad customers (restrict a subset of products, limits on the number of purchases you can return, etc). Once you codify it in law, it forces my hand in many ways, increasing prices making experience worse for my good customers.
- The regulation may change and the retailer may need to suddenly adapt to comply.
- It may not hurt those particular stores, but prevents cheaper competitors from emerging, which is a bad thing.
To show this whole thing is kind of stupid, where does "two years" come from? Some asshat in European parliament? Why not twenty years? Why not two months?
> retail customer experience and return policy is unmatched ... make it suck like Europe.
Maybe it's great in the US, I don't know, but it far from sucks in Europe. Amongst other things for returns policies you have a guaranteed 14 day return period for online orders even if there's no issues. Plus there's a minimum 2 years warranty, and a few years more if there's a reasonable expectation for the item in question to last longer. I'm not seeing the issue.
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.
I tried to book a small-group (~12 people) conference room at a US hotel and when I asked for a flipchart, they added "resort fees" and a $200 staff "service fee" to bring the flipchart into the room.
This was on top of renting me the flipchart for $107 for 6 hours.
This is just how hotels make money. The key is to be very nice to the person who actually brings out the flipchart and asked for it on site. Then it’s on them to actually record that they did it and you know what people are lazy enough and failed to record it.
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.
Tax-exclusive prices hide the true cost and encourage overspending by making things falsely appear cheaper. Their purpose is for businesses to squeeze more from their customers.
In NZ the price you see is the price you pay. The sales tax amount is always clearly stated on receipts, invoices, checkouts, online carts, etc. (by law) and the rate has changed twice in history, so everyone knows when it happens and who is responsible. Everything is explicit and nothing is or can be hidden (we don't do tipping either). In comparison when I visited the USA I never knew how much I would be paying for things, which felt fundamentally unfair and customer-opposed.
Funny, given that the product most US consumers are familiar with tax-inclusive pricing (gasoline) is the one product that hasn't had its tax rate changed in decades.
The government can not "screw the business and the end user" because tax rates are public. VAT changes don't just happen in secret. Tax changes to specific product categories (such as extra taxes for alcohol in some countries) are publically debated. And if you want lower taxes you try to vote in a more economically right-wing government. The framing of your statement makes it clear you just don't trust/like governments. That's fine, I guess, but it's an incredibly strong bias in your arguments
That's irrelevant. Give me the total price, so I know how much something will cost. I don't care what percentage of it goes where. I only care about easily evaluating whether something is worth the price.
Seriously. I don't care if the total price consists of 100% tax or 0% tax. I care only what it is. I don't ask to know how much you pay the cleaners, how much it costs to operate the pool, how much corporate profit you're booking, or how much the CFO is embezzling. The amount of tax is equally useless to me. I care what it costs me.
Looks like I'm not the only European that has seen a price tag of $9.50 on a product I wanted, only to find out that the $10 bill in my pocket was only two thirds of the amount needed!
Look at us poor Europeans with our metric-system money-math
The government routinely hides what you're paying in taxes. Case in point - the so-called "Employer's Contribution" to your social security taxes. There's no such thing. That comes out of your pocket, too.
This is because employers have no interest in what your paycheck amount is. They care about "total compensation", which is what it costs the employer to employ you. Seattle added some "payroll taxes" and successfully sold the fiction that it was the businesses paying it. The businesses did indeed write the check, but it was the employee's money.
In the US, a lot of people think of tax day as a "good day" because they get a refund from the government! Psychologically it is very different if you steal the money before they even see it than take it from them once they have felt it under their tongue.
Plus, I think the OP is referring to money that is technically paid by the employer but effectively passed through to the employee, because that's what happens, not some item on their payslip.
I can look it up if I am already motivated, but it is much easier for me to convince you to take a collective political action if you feel the depth of the government's dong in your rear end every day.
I care about what effects the policies are having, not how much I pay in taxes. The impact of the policies is what actually matters. The tax rate is one tiny detail. I'm not wired to automatically assume collective action is evil, so I only care about it in the context of the effects of all policies combined.
No one would blame the business. Receipts should show sales tax clearly.
I would very much blame the business for leaving out tax, concealing how much I'll need to pay to try to get me to overspend. Businesses claiming they don't want to be blamed for sales tax existing seems like misdirection from the real reason: it makes it look like you're spending less.
Everyone always blames price movements on the government anyways. And when it is tax inclusive--gasoline--the government hasn't dared to change the rate in decades!
Washington State added a 50c per gallon gas tax. They did it by taxing the oil companies, so when the pump prices went up 50c the politicians adamantly blamed the price increase on the oil companies.
So you believe that prices are set by supply and demand and nothing else in all of your other discussions, but when it comes to taxes, it's the government's fault?
When a tax hike happens, businesses don't automatically have to increase prices they charge by the same amount: they can take a hit to their margin instead. So, the price they choose to charge is not "price + tax". It is "supply-and-demand price, of which we pay X to the state in taxes".
The point is that supply and demand works on the final price, not on "price before tax". Especially when taxes are proportional, so if you offer a lower price than your competitor, you also pay less of it to the state in taxes. So the tax level is irrelevant to the value of the market price, if you believe in supply & demand as the price setting mechanism. Showing price without tax is then obviously a scam to try to attack your psychology to think it's cheaper. They could just as well show price - marketing costs.
Of course, if businesses actually set prices as cost + margin, then it does make sense to separate tax from the price, as the value "price before tax" is a meaningful part of the price setting algorithm.
And lowering your margin is not the same thing as running a low margin business. If your margin was 20% at a tax level of 10%, and taxes go to 15%, then reducing your margin to 18% doesn't make you a low margin business now. Regardless, if you believe in supply and demand as the sole mechanism for price setting, this is all moot: the state increasing taxes won't increase demand or reduce supply with the exact same level as the tax increase, so the price can't move the exact same as the tax increase in this model.
I'd also note that it's not strictly true that taxes are completely decoupled from supply & demand. States do compete on attracting businesses through lower taxation.
> supply and demand works on the final price, not on "price before tax"
That's correct.
> So the tax level is irrelevant to the value of the market price, if you believe in supply & demand as the price setting mechanism.
Taxes raise the price, which reduces demand. If the prices don't rise, then the margins decrease, which reduces the incentive for the business owners to continue.
> doesn't make you a low margin business
It makes you a lower margin business. It reduces the margins on all the businesses, and the marginal (!) ones are no longer viable, and a new set of businesses become at the edge.
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.
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.
Or: There's third-parties that are selling the stuff at seemingly-outrageous prices just because there aren't other sellers moving them in large, efficient [at least pallet-sized] quantities on Amazon.
People sometimes want whatever they want, and some people are willing to pay a lot for whatever that is. That is not necessarily abusive.
eg, I like sardines, and there's some very particular sardines that I'm rather fond of. I'd love to pay $1 or $2 per tin for them, but I'll also pay $6 per tin for them if I must when they just aren't available otherwise for whatever reason.
Much of this can be explained with just supply and demand.
Don't even ask me about the price of Heinz canned beans in tomato juice or bottles of HP Sauce in grocery stores in my part of Ohio. They're inexpensive staples in some parts of the world, but if I can even find them here they're ludicrously expensive.
Amazon (and third-party sellers using Amazon) are no different than my local grocer is in that particular way.
Back in context of TFA: The problem isn't that things can be expensive; the problem is primarily that one must be able to easily compare prices and products, and an Alexa device is presently a terrible interface for letting that happen. (The Amazon website is also sometimes not very good at this, even on a real computer.)
The marketplace stuff is the killer and downfall of any online shopping experience. Right now Walmart is easy enough to search and target and Home Depot are pretty good too, but once they start really focusing on the marketplace where they just make money with no expenses then it all goes to hell.
Ordering items from the system where you are buying products from a local Walmart store for pickup or delivery works very well. I find their Amazon-style marketplace chaotic, high priced and fairly useless, though.
I worked at Amazon when Fresh was rolling out in Seattle. A coworker thought he was ordering 10 bananas but when his order arrived he received 10 bunches of bananas.
Generously, he brought them in to share along with the story. I’m sure they made a lot of banana bread the following week.
I once ordered qty. 6 bananas from Instacart, expecting one fairly-medium bunch of bananas to show up with about 6 fruits in that bunch. The listing clearly showed that it was for "quantity", not "weight."
But I got 6 pounds of bananas, which is a ton for a single person living by themself. [And I don't bake, so I got plenty of fresh potassium that week.]
It only happened once. After that, I started leaving careful notes that describe each item where quantity/volume/weight might be confusing and things have been fine.
(I could have complained and Instacart would have rubber-stamped a refund for that part of the order without discussion, but it wasn't worth that much effort.)
It’s not only Instacart. The first target that I ever went to that had a grocery store had turkeys that had been labeled at $.25. Not $.25 a pound. I pointed it out to the cashier multiple times and she couldn’t understand what I was complaining about so eventually, I went home with my $.25 turkey.
Each has significant advantages - it means you do NOT need a state-certified scale for transactions; you just count.
It was obvious that that Target had never priced anything per pound before (it had just been remodeled to have a supermarket) and an employee fat-fingered the label. But the cashier had no recourse and I wasn't going to fight it hard.
(The same Target also had some clearance steaks for like ten cents a pound because they were close to expiration because none of the customers were expecting a supermarket in their target and weren’t buying perishables.)
They typically list out the unit but what ticks me off is when adjacent items have different units. One is in ounces, the second is per unit, their third one is per bag.
funny, bananas were the only thing they greatly lowered price (and quality) when they took over wholefoods.
before you had .8/lb and 1.2/lb true organic from south America. after you had both bins failed with the the same Asian chiquita, but the fresher ones labeled organic and they cost .8 and .6 per lb.
They're not perfect, and I think Amazon does combine listings for the same item (see "other sellers"), but the bigger issue is that the system prioritizes getting you exactly what you ask for over warning you of weird market shenanigans or out of stock sellers meaning prices are way higher than usual.
If Target is out of the brand of paper towels I like I don't go to the next store and buy them no matter the price, I get a different brand or skip it. If I had a human shop for me, they would also get a different brand of skip it. But that logic doesn't work with Amazon so it's not safe to trust it.
No, they aren't. GS1 - the organisation that administers retail barcodes - has rules about when to change the Global Trade Item Number for a product. The GTIN is what you probably mean by 'UPC' but GS1 now distinguishes between the abstract product number (the GTIN), and the concrete barcode symbology containing a 12-digit GTIN (UPC-A).
The Guiding Principles are:
* Is a consumer and/or trading partner expected to distinguish the changed or new product from previous/current products?
* Is there a regulatory/liability disclosure requirement to the consumer and/or trading partner?
* Is there a substantial impact to the supply chain (e.g., how the product is shipped, stored, received)?
Last time I looked at it, they fell prey to the region-locking-franchise nonsense. Something like each country had a registered office that would manage their namespace of codes with some sort of segregation or grouping.
Ofc what inevitably happened: same product from same company had two codes because because. Heinz Ketchup in Germany is not the same as Heinz Ketchup in Australia...and no one can tell you why.
Different recipe? Labeling? Different sizes... 160ml vs Country Z standard of 13.2oz, etc.
Oh and different codes for different groupings. Pack of 6 somethings got a new code VS the item itself as the barcode.
Not sure if you encountered the same shenanigans but I just stayed away. This is ultimately a people co-ordination problem and everyone thinks they're special. Meanwhile China spams all our market places with "Wish Wonder Elements Store" sellers that sell "40mm 1/2/6 pack of nail screws, woodworking, drill, conical shape, amazing product $1.22" and 5000 variations across all their sellers.
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)
I buy a lot of household stuff from Amazon. I also buy a lot of household stuff from lots of other places, mostly bricks-and-mortar.
I don't keep a spreadsheet. I find that when I buy a thing enough times (a particular size of a particular shampoo, say), I get a vague feel for what it "should" cost, and I definitely have a range of values around that expected cost that may be acceptable to me. I don't need a spreadsheet for this. (A spreadsheet wouldn't hurt at all, but it just isn't necessary for me; I don't want to spend the time to get that level of accuracy since the return on my time isn't there for me.)
But sometimes, an item is relatively unfamiliar or the price "feels" somewhat high or low -- whether at Amazon or locally.
When this happens, I comparison shop. I've gotten pretty quick at it.
Charts of historic Amazon pricing for things -- often pretty good but sometimes with large granularity -- are available at camelcamelcamel.com, which scrapes Amazon pricing and has done so for quite a long time.
So I look there to see if Amazon's price is good, relative to Amazon's previous pricing.
And then, if I still haven't found clear direction, I fire up Instacart's website. This lets me search many local stores all at once. (Their prices are often [but not always] inflated, but that's easy to get a feel for as well.)
After that, I have enough vaguely-accurate data to say to myself "Self, this shampoo is a terrible deal at Amazon and I'll just pick some up at the store," or "Self, this shampoo is a fantastic deal at Amazon, and I should order one or two extra bottles while it is cheap."
I wish Amazon's prices were more consistent (why is it $13 this week for a 24-pack of cans of V8 juice delivered to my door, and $60 the next week?), but meh. I can deal with it, as long as I have a real computer or time to fiddle with my pocket supercomputer. It's not so different from conventional "shopping."
I just can't deal with it using an Echo speaker and the limited interactions possible with Amazon's broken Alexa "AI". That's a non-starter, as things are today.
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In terms of quantities, I don't think I've ever been surprised by Amazon. I do not think I've never experienced a thing on Amazon like my parents once did, where they bought mustard at a wholesale club ("Wow, 208 ounces [or whatever] of mustard! What a great price!") and wound up with several hundred individual packets of Heinz mustard loose-packed in a cardboard box.
They were pretty surprised by this. Discussions were had. "What will we ever do with these mustard packets? Should we take it back?
What if they refuse to accept it? Is it even worth the money to drive over there again just for this? We still need mustard right now, too..."
They elected to keep it, and that wasn't the end of the world at all: We had plenty of mustard for a very long time, and it was indeed priced right; it just wasn't packaged in a particularly good way for what we were using it for.
(But then, maybe that experience when I was a kid made a lasting impression on me. And perhaps this was reinforced every time I went to retrieve some mustard from that huge box, wherein: I looked at that box. And when I looked at that box, I could always see that it was neatly labeled from the factory and that the contents wouldn't be surprising at all to anyone who was actually paying enough attention.
It is entirely possible that I might automatically scrutinize the offerings at Amazon, and also at the local grocery store, more than others do.)
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?
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.
B&H is one of the places I check first before ordering on Amazon, which is about fifth on any list because fuck Amazon.
There’s a CS book I want to read but because the author self published I can only find it on Amazon. I need to try the book store at his university, and I’m not going to buy from Jeff until I’ve tried that avenue.
You lost me when you said their processes for books was "fine" -It may be good in some ways, but my experience of how they wrap it for consumer use is a giant mass of anti-patterns.
Charles Dickens should be the top match on the actual author, or at the very least biographies. But no. Amazon want us to go to "in the style of" or "related to a series which tangentially discussed Oliver twist" linkages "for your convenience"
Amazon will no doubt have A/B testing which shows net beneficial to revenue overall.
Amazon gets a lot better with an ad blocker because most of the crap is sponsored results at the top of the search which if they’re gone, you get stuff that’s closer to an actual result for your search.
Don’t be baffled… “worlds largest selection” pivoted to worlds largest fence. Financially, the third party product is better for Amazon (no inventory - the third party stuff is a revenue generator!)
How exactly does Spooky23 have the buying power to price competitively with a major retailer? The answer is pretty obvious. It’s cheaper to pay crackheads to loot CVS than to troll for clearance blowouts.
Plus, Amazons search is garbage. Available items that exactly match the query get ignored. Actually the query only vaguely resembles the results. There is basically no filter functionality (even simple things like which item I can get tomorrow), and the few filters that do exist are ignored. It's like they're playing some funny psycho game with you in order to make you buy stuff that's not quite what you want, even though they do have what you want.
I don’t think Amazon created this on purpose. They did create a system where individual vendors are incentivised to scam consumers though.
The most common and irritating one I see is making a listing for a product at a low price, selling lots of said item and getting people lulled into reordering, then bump the price, change the per-order quantity, or even change the brand or product sold under that listing, 10xing your profit on residual reorders, while you relish the original deal on a new item number. Rinse and repeat.
What the replies seem missing is that books are not just the thing Amazon started with but also subject to regulation around pricing in places like Germany, which Amazon sells in. The reason they seem to have good and consistent data on many books is that it's necessary in order to avoid violating laws and regulations.
Yes there should be a simple test such as "show me the cheapest three meter hdmi cable including shipping". Both ebay and amazon fail it spectacularly. Perhaps they don't want a race to the bottom?
Agreed. Everytime I order supplements, I have to create a spreadsheet to compare the price per active ingredient weight. Hard to standardize such a thing, of course, but for a lot of other household articles it would definitely be possible.
I believe an awful lot of it is due to allowing third party sellers.
And I think a lot of it is third party sellers uploading their catalogs without trying to sanely de-dupe it vs what's already there. And Amazon certainly doesn't help in how they organize their search results. Please give me a simple size and quantity separate from the description. So often I have to open up a bunch of entries because the description is long enough to push that off the summary you see on the search page.
I also think there are a lot of entries on there where the main objective is to get accidentally grabbed when the main supplier is out of stock.
To be fair, Amazon didn't create this.
Even supermarkets position products at different height to steer their sales, and the majority of customers grab the laundry detergent from the mid-shelf with the most sensational pricing-tag.
A specific book is also a far more unique product than i.e. "laundry detergent".
To be comparable, you would have to compare laundry detergent to a genre of books, and maybe also the publisher.
And then the absurdity of some of Amazon's "Smart Shopping" strategies becomes quite obvious: Is there a market for an Amazon Dash-button that blindly ships i.e. a "fiction book from Penguin publishing"...?
I wonder how true that is. I guess it’s your first time buying detergent it might work but most people I know have a specific detergent and they buy the same one no matter where on the shelf it moves.
The fact that the middle shelf of a supermarket is usually the first one to be empty is quite compelling evidence.
> I guess it’s your first time buying detergent it might work but most people I know have a specific detergent and they buy the same one no matter where on the shelf it moves.
Just to validate that assumption: Would you say this is the same for toilet paper? Soap? garbage bags? Sponges? Pencils? cooking-oil?
There are lots of commodity items I use where I don't know the brand, I cannot even tell how often I switched the supplier of them in the past year...
Subjectively, most people _I_ know buy out of a pool of detergent-brands, all looking quite similar (and most belonging to the same parent company).
If they are bombarded with advertisement inside and outside of the shop, and maybe a stacked palette of a different brand of detergent, many of them will "try" this new product instead and end up expanding their pool of brands they will buy.
For most of the items like toilet paper and paper towels and soap, we have specific brands that we always get the only differences which size seems to be the cheapest to me at the time. The wife is very adamant about those.
This means, at one point in time these specific brands used the same techniques to turn you into their dream customer: A buyer who is loyal to them no matter what competitors and even the retailers are offering.
Your choices are influenced by exposure, and I don’t mean Tuesday. I mean your entire childhood and adolescence as well.
How did you decide on that brand, really? And what was your second choice? Even if you narrowed down to three options by pure rationalism the tiebreaker is often emotional. Then we convince ourselves the decision was objective even when it was not.
At least with TP the choice was blind, as I was buying whatever was cheapest and receiving complaints until I just started trying every brand until a specific one “won out”.
See I don’t understand how they have multiple vendors for Kraft or Johnson and Johnson products. There are no multiple suppliers.
Coca Cola I can understand, but those are all franchisees and the parent company watches them like a hawk. Mostly what they make is purified water to mix with the syrup they got from corporate to reduce shipping costs and losses.
For branded products a seller would need an agreement with Kraft or Johnson and Johnson as a reseller before Amazon will let you list. Many companies do have multiple reseller (most with geographical limitations) but some like shoe companies are more strict.
Then you have Apple and Amazon creating the brand Amazon renewed to sell watches.
Not just many suppliers of generic products, but suppliers come and go on an almost weekly basis thanks to always choosing the cheapest, suppliers going out of business, etc. Hooray capitalism.
Nothing on Amazon is going to work like books on Amazon do.
Amazon is, originally and primarily, a bookstore. Amazon has long-established direct contracts with all book publishers (and in fact, a stranglehold over those publishers.) Any time you see a book listed on Amazon, it's a book sold by Amazon, attained directly from one of these publishers.
AFAIK no third-party sellers are even allowed to sell "books" Fulfilled By Amazon; if you see a third-party FBA "book" on Amazon, it's because the seller slipped it in under some category other than "books." (The "novelties" and "calendars" sections are often abused for this.)
But for categories other than books, Amazon never built up this same direct logistical pipeline to suppliers, let alone the sort of stranglehold over suppliers in other categories that they have over book suppliers. So Amazon doesn't have the ability to force constant, even, predictable supply with contractually-set pricing in other categories, the way they can with books.
Often, this means that Amazon's first-party supply chain for something, might just run out of that thing entirely.
Part of the reason the FBA program exists is that it allows Amazon to take advantage of third parties' connections to suppliers to compensate for their own supply-chain deficits. Amazon-the-asset-holder might have run out of e.g. Kleenex, but that doesn't mean that Amazon-the-site or Amazon-the-pool-of-warehouses has run out of Kleenex, because Amazon has allowed some third-party FBA seller to stock stuff in their warehouses, and that seller happens to have brought in some stock that have the UPC code for Kleenex. So hey, there you go, we have Kleenex after all! Only now Amazon has to follow the seller's dictates on pricing and discounts — and your experience on availability (unless/until first-party supply comes back) will be dictated by the seller's (usually much-less-predictable) ability+desire to resupply.
There are situations where this model actually makes sense! Some mid-sized OEMs that Amazon doesn't feel are worth their while to engage with directly, instead sell their products directly through Amazon as FBA sellers. In these cases, buying the product on Amazon is just like buying the product through the seller's website, but you get it faster because it's already in an Amazon warehouse.
That said, despite FBA having times where it makes a lot of sense, I also find Amazon Marketplace distinctly baffling. A thing sold by a third party, shipped by that third party, with returns handled by that third party, shouldn't be able to be conflated with an Amazon.com/Amazon FBA listing just because of a shared UPC code! Those are two very distinct experiences and are not fungible, and it's bizarre to pretty much everyone I know that Amazon has tried to conflate them.
I've gotten both novels and textbooks from Amazon that I'm not certain aren't counterfeits. (The textbook one is especially fuzzy, as sometimes you'll actually get an "international edition" which isn't necessarily fake...but may not be what you actually ordered either.)
These days, I'm not sure books are much different from any other good.
I am fairly certain that you're incorrect re: selling books with FBA.
Source: I've self-published books and sold them on Createspace, KDP, Amazon Advantage, and all of their old systems before switching to using my own local printer and shipping the books to FBA.
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.
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.
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.
With the exception of foodstuffs, where I don't want to have to worry about perishability and storage, I've got most of these on scheduled deliveries - toilet paper every 4 weeks, laundry tabs every 6 months, etc. Once you figure out the appropriate rate and with a little bit of buffer stock to account for variability, you never run out of anything.
I don’t want toilet paper every 4 weeks, I want it when I have 2 rolls left. If we’re away, that might be 6 weeks. If we have family visiting it might be 3 weeks. If I buy toilet roll in the shop, my subscript still comes unless I cancel it.
To be clear, these are minor complaints, but they are the things that asking Alexa to order should solve
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!
That’s the exact opposite of blind ordering though. You’re planning your orders way ahead of time.
That’s not to say that it isn’t useful, but it doesn’t do anything against the narrative that Amazon is not trustworthy like it used to be. It’s a common theme in the comments here. When I think about it, it’s been a common theme on HN for years now, ever since commingling destroyed Amazon’s reputation
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!"
The added dynamic of Amazon is they might not even be Tide pods but some counterfeit or perhaps a batch that didn’t pass quality control to sell in more traditional brick and mortar.
My latest in a long list of WTF was I ordered a medical device (new). It came in a package that had once been sealed but the seal was cut. Upon removing the product, it had clearly been used by someone and returned. It was a sling for my arm, and I intend to use it for 2-3 weeks until things feel better but I wouldn’t return it like the last person did. I returned it immediately. I’m not accepting open box items of that nature.
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".
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.
Being in Canada makes Amazon seem entirely unhinged. I'll see something on Wirecutter or some other review site, click through to Amazon.com and see that it's only $64. Great. Switch to Amazon.ca and it's $350, presumably because of some bot that sees there's no one else selling it so it lists it for some huge price to take advantage of arbitrage.
Some things will double in price, or just suddenly be out of stock for no apparent reason. They tried to push groceries but a case of Kraft Dinner came out to several dollars per box, compared to about $1.50 from my extremely expensive local grocery or half that from Costco.
They never sold those dash buttons in Canada, but I can imagine pushing the button to get more tide pods and being irate when the cost was twice as much as it was last time.
Put another way, I don't trust amazon to not screw me. Many people have concerns, some based in reality and some completely imagined, about Amazon and other large corporations trying to screw them for just a few more cents.
Why would I give up what little control I have?
Buying purely on voice commands is new and different. In an environment of trust that is novel and exciting. In an environment of fear or concern that is scary and burdensome. Why would I choose burdensome?
They need more trust, which means being more trustworthy. That likely means losing some profits for consistency.
They need a smooth voice purchasing experience and I have no clue what that means.
On top of that, when you consider how often Alexa plays the wrong song, it's pretty hard to trust it with purchases. The equivalent of asking for a pop song and getting heavy metal would be trying to order some pens and ending up with a canoe or something.
Yes, the absolute deluge of options for price and shipping speed is one of my chief concerns as well, even outside of voice based orders. This plagues the web interface as well, requiring you to either try and refine via search options (not always available!) or basically doom scrolling. Even a simple sort option, like Ebay has had for years on price v distance, would be a welcome change.
But it seems that, much like Google search and the glut of questionable sites gaming the system via SEO, I think Amazon too will always be fighting against sellers clamoring to be 'above the fold' of results.
LOL, makes me think of something more like putting in an order on a stock exchange:
Alexa, what's the current price of a small box of Tide Pods?
A box of 10 Tide Pods costs $5
Alexa, place a limit order for a box of 10 Tide Pods at $5 to expire at the end of the day if not filled, and notify me when it is filled.
If I can order you a box of 10 Tide Pods for $5 or less today, I will do so and notify you.
...time passes...
I have filled your order for a box of 10 Tide Pods for $5; they are expected to be delivered within the next two days
Not that this would necessarily be a good thing, but it seems to me like it would generally beat having to pull out my phone or fire up my browser and do it that way...
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.
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.
Exactly... I'll order an item a few times a few weeks apart... then the next time it's suddenly 50% higher priced. No real reason why. I've taken to actually ordering direct from a few different mfgs for a few things Amazon has had that local stores haven't simply because Amazon's pricing is sometimes unreasonable.
That they outright lie about "retail" when doing sales is also offputting. The irony is I've started to appreciate Prime Video, and now they charge extra for that without commercials. It's infuriating all around.
That doesn't even begin to cover counterfeit, expired or other problems on fulfillment such as saying it'll be there tomorrow until the order is placed and you get it 4 days later, or maybe not at all (lost?).
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...
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.
These days, you can't even pick out a brand-name product from a brick and mortar store and be sure of getting the real thing.
People will buy something from a store, buy a fake version of that thing on AliExpress, swap the fake into the box, re-shrinkwrap the box, return the shrinkwrapped fake to the store, and sell the real one on eBay.
The store will often put the thing back on the shelf, because it's still shrinkwrapped, weighs the same, and even looks the same under an x-ray.
And then someone buys it and gets a dud.
This is why, except for a few high-margin categories, Amazon itself will never put returned stock back into inventory, instead always selling it off through bulk channels. It's effectively impossible to authenticate a return as legitimate these days, without converting the "BNIB" device into a "NIB" device.
Amazon put tons of stuff back on the shelf. It’s not quite as bad as Fry’s Electronics where every single thing they sold had obviously been opened and shrink up, but it’s getting close.
> People will buy something from a store, buy a fake version of that thing on AliExpress, swap the fake into the box, re-shrinkwrap the box, return the shrinkwrapped fake to the store, and sell the real one on eBay.
Because eBay will respond very angrily when people report getting the fake piece of junk. Walmart doesn’t care if you are intelligent work hard at it. You don’t even have to give them your drivers license and they never know.
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.
I once bought a "new" hard drive from Amazon. It was an enterprise datacenter drive with thousands of hours. Someone had scrubbed the SMART statistics, but did not wipe the drive. They deleted the partition table, but it was still chock full of data. Mostly encrypted, but there was plenty of cleartext logs including runtime statistics for the rack the drive was in.
I'm about 85% sure it was a decommissioned Backblaze drive based on the logs I could see. This was probably 10 years ago, though.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
I've never used Alexa, and hardly use Amazon anymore, but this kinda gave me an idea.
Is it possible to ask Alexa to add generic items to a list, then be able to iterate said list as Amazon searches? That seems kinda useful, if it exists.
Maybe I'm not the every man, but I price shop. If All free is on sale half of Tide free, I'm ordering that, and so on.
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.
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.
Amazon will accept returns, but not like Costco will or sears did.
Sears would exchange any broken craftsman tool for a new one even decades after purchase. Costco is much the same. Used, year old stuff with missing parts will gladly be refunded in full.
To be fair to Costco you have to understand that the way they do that is they just send the item back to the vendor and deduct it from the next purchase. The vendors only option is to not sell stuff to Costco anymore.
I think it's the other way around. Kirkland takes the "B quality stock" and sells it under it's own label. This is why they have an essentially no questions asked return policy. If the quality dips it eats into this margin and the provider is back to making next to nothing on units that fail to pass their own more stringent brand QA checks.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, my wife and I always check out the local costco when visiting a city. I can't remember which one it was but I distinctly remember being surprised at all the asian-type foods at one. They had squid chips, sushi, boba, and all kinds of strange things. I want to say it was Oregon or Seattle but it's been a while
I saw a picture of the Costco in Alaska a few years ago and it was full of camping gear and salmon and stuff like that. It was pretty cool. I think it was Juneau, the "smallest Costco."
> 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.
Costco sells a lot of junk food because Americans, as a whole, eat a lot of junk food. They also stock a lot of staples (rice, beans, flour, cooking oils, canned/frozen fruits/veggies, &c), and decent quality raw fruit/veggies/meat. Not liking the Costco shopping experience is a pretty reasonable point of view (it forces you to plan/structure your shopping and food storage in weird ways IMO), but it seems like a strange complaint to zero in on the selection of processed foods when they really do seem to try and accommodate a wide variety of needs and preferences the best they can.
They also sell kind of strange (compared to the bags of doritos) stuff periodically, which I love. For instance the Costco in Maine (of all places) has Bird Nest Soup and NordeX PIKNIK cheese in a can. Kind of apropos of nothing. It's pretty cool.
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.
> Are there actually good juices on the public market?
I never found one.
Fruit juices consist of fructose. It's bad for you in high quantities, just like sugar. Eating a piece of fruit is healthy for you - fructose in small quantities, and the rest of the fruit slows down its digestion. Fruit juice is a fructose bomb.
Not really. I was just using OJ as an example because for whatever reasons I've been paying attention to the pricing of different breakfast places OJ + grocery OJ since covid. I pay $7 for "fresh squeezed" from Einsteins, but Syrup a popular breakfast place next to me charges $8.99 for a cup about half the size of that. I made that mistake once.
I was just hoping for healthier, zero/low sugar options of a lot more things at Costco. If I ever have a zero/low sugar option, I usually get it. I haven't drank a full sugar soda in a decade and avoid all sugar so my tolerance to sweet things is super low. Black coffee, etc.
No/low sugar isn't inherently better for you...just saying. Most of the time stuff that advertises that there's no or low sugar is packed with sweeteners that your body still treats as sugars...but massive food conglomerates have lobbied the FDA to allow them to say there's no added sugar.
Plus, if you're drinking fruit juice to help stay hydrated, you literally need sugars and salts to actually instigate the hydration process.
What are you talking about? Buy a bag of oranges and a juicer from Costco and you’re set. You can also get 50lb bag of rice, tons of produce, milk, eggs, meat—you don’t need to buy the processed junk foods. In fact I don’t find many stores other than Costco where I can buy e.g. entire cuts of meat to cut into steaks myself.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
I think that could work, but not on Amazon. Their prices are all over the place. I bought a textbook, new on Amazon. Sold by Amazon, dispatched by Amazon. $30. When looking at that same listing it is now $90.
I don’t want Alexa to buy me a new bottle of my shampoo when it can be $10 one week at $50 the next.
But from Walmart or Target? There’s a price stability where you can basically go shopping without looking at the price tags. A price of a toilet roll won’t explode because of some price algorithm fighting each other.
>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.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
Hm, but wasn't the price of items ordered through the Dash buttons subject to change, too? Like last week when you set everything up it was $5 per item, but sellers changed and now its $15? Sounds risky to me without checking the order confirmation mails...
They only sold the buttons for specific brand names. The only one that had a brand I used was Charmin, and we had a specific pack size picked. The price was only going to change a little based on the market for toilet paper, so we didn't check it often. I had another for Dial soap but Dial discontinued the product I bought.
> 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.
This is a problem in general with a whole bunch of products.
If I'm paying up-front, the subscription needs to be an optional add-on that provides additional value. The thing should continue working at some base level for its working lifetime, even if I cancel or the service is shut down.
If the "base level" on the thing I bought is ever changed after my purchase, the company has burned their trust with me. In fact I'll probably switch away and never buy anything from them again.
On the other hand, if they want to build it so a subscription is required to work at all, then I don't want to buy the hardware that I clearly don't actually "own" anyway. It's fair to require paying up-front for a year or two (eg: cell plans) or have a contract requiring a minimum term because obviously the hardware costs something to produce, but in this type of business the product is really the subscription, and the device is just the means of delivery.
Exactly. In our household Alexa is used for playing Spotify, switching some lights on and off, and as an intercom. There is absolutely no chance that I am paying a subscription for a device that is pretty bad as an intercom, and only okay as a light controller/speaker.
In fact, this quote from the article is a little concerning:
> The new technology would more seamlessly allow users to control functions like smart home devices using their voices rather than opening an app.
Problem is, the existing technology can already do this, most of the time. It sounds very much like Amazon is going to try and charge me a monthly fee for something I already have. That's not going to work out.
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.
It would've worked if Amazon hadn't turned their store into a cesspit of fakes, random 3rd parties sellers and arbitrary pricing. At this point if I pressed one of those buttons I'd have zero confidence in what might turn up. If Costco or the like had those buttons that would add it to a regular delivery I'd plaster the house with them.
This is the core problem. If what I wanted was the first search results every time I searched Amazon, and I had no decisions to make between search and buy... then Alexa could work. That is far from the reality. This is a problem Amazon created, so it's hard to feel bad for them.
Not only had this hurt their Alexa dreams, imo it has hurt their brand reputation as well. Amazon is no longer a retailer I trust. I would much rather buy from a more traditional store that doesn't have 3rd party sellers, and maintains standard prices and quantities.
Tangent, have you considered using the powder? It's much cheaper and you can pour the amount you need. The pods only come in large sizes so you're almost always going to be wasting detergent.
I've used the detergent before but I find it messy sometimes or it will clog the detergent door. I use the cheap Finish tabs now. The do just as well as the expensive pods.
I used pods for years after lots of clogged machines with powder.
Now I use powder again, cleans clothes so much better and haven’t experienced the same clogging as years ago.
I use white vinegar instead of fabric softener as I have sensitive skin, wash sheets on 90C which cleans the machine, and still use pods on short washes.
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.
As an aside, the clock pairs nicely with timers. A sibling of mine who works second and third shift likes it in part because it keeps the time, isn’t illuminated (7 segment leds are out) and the analog aesthetic but without any noise of many analog clocks ticking.
I have one in my kitchen (no echo show for exact values on a timer), and it does a nice job with the timers.
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.
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?
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.
>sell the hardware for more than it costs to make.
That probably won't work because, at least according to Wikipedia, at some point 10k (!) people worked on Alexa. I'd start at the other end, maybe don't hire an entire Death Star worth of people to develop a voice assistant. That'd probably have saved a few billion here and there.
This seems like such a solvable problem. It only requires some profile setup.
Take the most commonly re-ordered items on Amazon (paper towels, toothbrushes, etc) and have the user select a preferred product, brand, and fallback for each one, as well as a maximum price. Some of that is already implemented for Subscribe & Save and Whole Foods delivery/pickup orders. They could even leverage that existing system.
For less common items, first check the user’s purchase history for something similar and announce if the price has increased more than few percentage points or is not in a normal range for the product category.
That will cover a lot of cases. For the rest, refer the user to do some research on the computer.
Nobody wants to go through building a list of common items. I would just leave the door and come back with my toilet paper, bought from the shop, 5 minutes later.
Also I don't understand that "let's order household stuff" online randomly and individually example. Sure sometimes you run out of something but I think it mostly happens to people like me who live in small places because we don't have the space to have 3 packs of 6 rolls of toilet paper. But usually people who live in small spaces are usually the ones living in high density places where small groceries shops are always available at walking distance. People who live in suburbs usually have enough storage space and do their shopping of houshold items once a month and never run out of anything.
I have most household items on subscription. It saves a ton of time and costs about the same, maybe a little less for some items. And most importantly, it means I never forget something and then have to make another trip.
For me, in spite of living in an ex-urban location, there's a Walmart a 10 minute drive away. But I can absolutely see (and know people) for whom picking up a big package of paper towels in Brooklyn is sort of a pain.
The problem is that they thought consumers were dumb and lazy and would just blindly order Tide Pods no matter what the price. That's not how it works, and Amazon lost a lot of trust over the last 10+ years that their prices were the best.
They should incorporate AI and allow people to have a conversation. "Alexa, how much are Tide Pods?" "They are $10/pack right now, the last time they were lower was May 2023." "Are these cheaper than Walmart?" "No.", etc. But of course they are so greedy they want to try to funnel people directly into Amazon, and their greed is why they are don't have sales through Alexa.
> 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.
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.
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.
> The problem is that consumers don't behave like that.
Actually they do, just not on Amazon. If you search for 'tide pods' you'll find a WHOLE page of product listings on the first page of the search results full of duplicates and confusing quantity packages. If I do the same on Target.com there are roughly 10~12 products I can actually choose from which is much easier to decipher which one to actually order.
>> 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.
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.
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.
e.g. I order a particular soap/shampoo or coffee beans every few months. If they had tried recognizing it, they could actually have improved the experience.
> 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.
I think they've squandered it so much that I think it wouldn't be impossible for someone else to build a site with substantial traffic aggregating and sanitizing Amazon results (whether you could profit off of that might be a different question).
(I have seen people try this but it's immediately apparent that it's not hand-curated. I think selling that point needs to be priority.)
> 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.
I don't think this is right. My understanding is the average Dash Button was pressed ~5 times, which isn't bad. The problem was that "subscribe and save" generated more orders than that.
For what it's worthy, my company[1] makes a re-ordering IoT device that uses weight to re-order rather than a button click, and we generate more orders than "subscribe and save" programs. This suggests that the problem with Dash was that the habit was not easy to build, not that people wanted to see the product page.
The standard profile from these tech companies is that the consumer is staggeringly, profoundly, unimaginably daft and they're either looking to shop or to have some venal vapid interaction devoid of substance.
Google, Facebook, Amazon, this is exactly how they design their products.
It might have worked, if Amazon policed their sellers. However, there are so many poor or scammy sellers, so many counterfeit products, that you really have to scrutinize every order.
Aside from books, Amazon has become my last choice as a place to order.
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.
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 £5 or £10 today? No thanks lol.
Amazon had low trust back then. It's even worse now
I actually do use Alexa to buy stuff pretty often, but it’s stuff that I’ve already ordered on Amazon, and which I can’t conveniently buy locally, like pure sucralose powder and aeropress filters.
And that’s the problem. I’m not shopping with Alexa, because that experience is excruciating. I’m reordering things which I was already going to order through Amazon. They’re not actually generating new sales there; they’re just saving me from having to pull my phone out.
Out-of-touch execs that don't know how people shop. They love the experience of having a personal assistant they can tell "buy some flowers for my wife," and they aren't price-sensitive. They happily trade off control over the exact purchase for the time savings.
From that point of view, a robot assistant that you tell "buy me one banana what could it cost ten dollars," and it automatically buys something from their store - that's a slam dunk.
This has many problems. Imagine you are watching a video clip when someone orders a sack of potatoes through Alexa. What is the chance Alexa will place the order?
Or say you wanted to order flour and got flowers etc etc.
Then pranks. Guests enter your house and say "Alexa order 10 packs of cheese!" and you have to rush to cancel it.
Then Amazon has a tonne of spam and rubbish products, what are the chances you get garbage shipped to your house and not the things you wanted.
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.
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.
They need to make money through an associated line of Alexa compatible products, like smart bulbs, door bells, phones, window shutters, ...
It would be very hard to convince me to buy another subscription for something like Alexa. They would be competing with all the other Big Tech subscriptions I'm paying and that budget is limited. There's only space for a few of those before any new ones become a very tough sell.
> 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.
I wouldn't. Amazon wouldn't be able to stop them selves double-dipping like they did with prime, throwing in adverts etc.
Subscription models were fine, until they weren't enough to keep big tech growth placated.
> 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".
Dash button was great and i stopped using amazon completely over it’s cancellation precisely because i don’t want to go to the app or the website. They canned it because they can’t upsell you on random crap you don’t need
I noticed that in the past year my Alexa speakers have gotten really great at handling long tail fact-finding questions (about history, health, etc.). I use it a few times a week to learn something, when I don't feel like picking up a device.
I actually trust it much more than ChatGPT since it never hallucinates and it cites its source.
> I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy".
This is doubly true ever since they let shady sellers/scammers run free on their platform. I trust AliExpress more than I trust Amazon for any product that isn't explicitly "Sold by Amazon".
> The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales.
As someone who knows folks that worked on Amazon Alexa (back in its earliest days), this was almost never the focus of Alexa. It might seem cool or trendy to constantly hate on Amazon here on HN, and then somehow tie that to some comment on free market capitalism, Amazon did in fact have very normal ambitions with Alexa, build a smart assistant. Bezos, particularly envisioned building some computer from star-trek as his inspiration.
Alexa in its early days was also quite impressive for what they managed to do. It was an example of early ML scaling. They rented hundreds of houses around Seattle, had voice actors talk in different locations in the houses, collected all that data and trained a speech recognition model that was SOTA at the time. Unfortunately while their voice recognition was great, they didn’t apply this scaling approach to natural language understanding. They instead went the root of trying to manually understanding grammar, and iterating all the thousands of possible sentence reconstructions in a large decision tree to help Alexa answer your queries. This of course was hopeless, but this was also almost 5 years before OpenAI released GPT-3 so you can’t fault them for doing essentially what Siri did.
Now the issue with Alexa is like most issues big organizations face, they are slow moving and cannot pivot quickly. What they need to do, is actually hard and will need to be done by essentially a monarch CEO, he needs to delete all the work the Alexa teams have done over the last 5 years in 1 swoop and replace it with LLM’s. Many folks in Amazon made their career on improving the Alexa stack, they will of course mostly be defensive and argue vehemently against deleting entirety of Alexa tech “LLM’s hallucinate too much, we need a combined approach”, they will plead, but the stack needs to be deleted, the entire organization needs to pivot to LLMs. Apple has managed to take steps towards this, I won’t be surprised if Amazon soon will, or maybe they won’t, depends on their ability to not be disrupted.
If they are guilty of anything, it’s being unable to do good research to discover GPT-3 on their own (though tbf no one except OpenAI did this), and then being unable to ditch all the technical debt they have accumulated over 5+ years and pivot completely into LLM’s.
> The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales.
Exactly why Amazon Fire phone failed. So, they didn't learn their lesson. What happened to their leadership principles, specifically - Customer Obsession: Leaders start with the customer and work backwards?
Amazon makes more money on shady tactics than making ordering with that sort of mechanism too expensive.
Check camel camel… Tide pods vary 25% in price, from ok to ridiculous. When Amazon runs out you’ll get subbed with third party seller (probably stolen) product.
If I could use a dash button with Target, I would use it.
There was a noticeable drop in the quality of her ability to understand and answer questions a couple years back. I didn't get one when they came out in 2014, so I can't compare, but the capability is worse than it was when I first got one maybe 5 years ago.
It is funny… based on the way Coke (and Pepsi)prices their products (prices all over the place and near constant discounts) they seem to have a critical mass of people that buy their 12pack every time they go the the store no matter the cost.
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.
>The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales.
is there anything wrong with that? I kind of thought that is one of the main reasons for the existence of companies, that is, to increase sales, and hopefully, profits.
biz 101: losses in business commonly happen anytime. losses are not wrong or right. they just happen, for various reasons. it is called an occupational hazard. if getting profits all the time was guaranteed, every tom, dick and harry would be running a business.
so companies know about the possibility of losses before they start up.
>and consumers didn't have their expectations met.
naive. companies don't do businesses for that reason. that is kind of a side effect, although a desirable one for companies, because it makes customers continue as customers. companies do business to make money (i.e. profits, not even just sales), plain and simple.
whether we like that or not, and whether their behaviour is ethical or not, and legal or not, are separate, though related issues.
how many times has this been stated on hn, even if in other words? plenty, I bet.
apart from that, it is sheer common knowledge.
>>is one of the main reasons for the existence of companies, that is, to increase sales, and hopefully, profits
>You're describing the main reason for owning one.
Yes. Is that not obvious?
>This has nothing to do with why we collectively allow them to exist.
you are jumping around, and skirting my question. you, i, or we, may or may not wish to allow them to exist, but what the heck does that have to do with my original question? :
>>>The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales.
>>is there anything wrong with that? I kind of thought that is one of the main reasons for the existence of companies, that is, to increase sales, and hopefully, profits.
I doubt that there is any company that envisions a product that will decrease sales, or even keep them flat. then why go to the trouble?
Don't make 8 generations of products that do not profit while simultaneously changing nothing other than their form factor.
> companies don't do businesses for that reason.
I didn't say they did. Perhaps you should slow down and use fewer insults while you craft your replies. In any case, if you are losing money and customers are happy, that's certainly different than losing money and customers are not happy. Would you not agree this is "sheer common knowledge" as well?
> and skirting my question.
The product is a full decade old. This does not seem to factor into your question or arguments at all. Perhaps it should?
not everywhere. different strokes for different folks, I guess. in fact, that would be more the case where I am from, India, where people in general seem to have thinner skins, compare to the US at least. I know this because I have a background of both places. and also, a senior software architect from a US company where I once worked (in the Indian branch, he was in the US) came on a visit once, and told me personally (I was a dev manager in the Indian branch) that if our US colleagues sometimes seemed to talk a bit roughly, in our conference calls, it was not intentional, but just in the spirit of getting into the topic, making their views felt, and with the goal of coming to a good outcome. and I understood that point and had no issues with it.
in any case, i had no intention of insulting you, sorry if you felt that way.
maybe I was talking in the same way as that architect described, possibly due to having picked up on that trend, after having worked in that company.
Often or always? Is reading a generic description of a product (menu) seeing the thing?
What about alcoholic drinks in pubs or bars “2 pints of your best and a glass of house red”.
Alexa may not be great for purchasing from Amazon but this isn’t because humans have never shopped using only their voices. Nor is seeing things required.
The dash button doesn’t use voice it hasn’t proved popular either. Various other threads suggest stability of pricing as an issue. Voice ordering may be part of the issue, as might being unable to see the goods. There is likely a number of issues. The fact something doesn’t work doesn’t prove a single explanation.
>People don't shop with their voices and never have.
>They need to see things.
Nyet. Non. Nada.
What world do you live in?
People seeing things and then shopping with their voices are not mutually exclusive actions.
Not only are they complementary, they are very common, and must have been from the dawn of shops.
How many billions of times, worldwide, must people have looked around at some products there, and said "give me 5 foos and 10 bars" at their neighbourhood store or other shop?
IVR is not a good example because it's an annoying interface that people sometimes have to deal with when calling companies. It actually offers pretty poor UX, because users sometimes know what they want when calling but have to wait to hear the options before making a selection. But it's the best we have for over-the-phone interfaces.
Are you someone who orders things using the Echo? If not, are you just playing devil's advocate?
That already exists too, but it's also poor UX because it processes your response slower than a person would, and it sometimes misunderstands what you're saying or asks you to repeat.
For the sake of argument, we can imagine the Echo technology is advanced enough to be on par with speaking to a real person, like your own personal assistant that you trust.
I could see it being useful for recurring purchases when I run out of an item, although I (and I assume most people) get these items from the grocery store. For items you've never purchased before, I could also see it being useful if, like a personal assistant, it prepares a short list of items to choose from based on your purchasing preferences. But I would still rather see the list of the items before making the purchase.
no I don't use the Echo. but I was not playing devil's advocate. I was just arguing against some people's statements on the basis of logic as I see it. do you think there is anything wrong with doing that? I see it happening on hn all the time. and I think it is the only basis for rational discussion. otherwise what should we go on, emotions?
those have their place, but I think are out of place in debates.
>Again, no one buys things using only such an interface.
I was talking about future possibilities, not the past. I would have thought that was clear from my comment. but maybe it was not worded clearly, or maybe you didn't get it.
>I am middle aged and have never done, not even in pre-e-commerce times.
you are not the same entity as everyone else. you are one, they are numerous.
just the fact that you have never done it does not mean that no one else has ever done it, or would not like to do it.
>It is a non-existent behavior, and there was no reason to think Alexa could will it into existence.
non-existent past behaviours can become future existing behaviours.
I meant Amazon building that feature into Alexa, not that Alexa would create it by itself.
> I was talking about future possibilities, not the past.
Why would anyone want to do an audio-only interface? If there were a need or desire for it, it would have popped up somewhere else in society. It hasn't.
> you are not the same entity as everyone else. you are one, they are numerous.
OK, let me rephrase that. I've never heard of a single other person buying a single thing using an audio-only interface. It probably happens, but it's rare enough that it's safe to say Amazon was trying to invent a brand new human behavior, which (I will reiterate) is stupid.
>> I was talking about future possibilities, not the past.
>Why would anyone want to do an audio-only interface? If there were a need or desire for it, it would have popped up somewhere else in society. It hasn't.
what utter rubbish you talk, dude.
you are talking repeatedly past me, that is, not directly addressing my replies, instead, you are going off at a tangent each time. that's not the way to conduct a rational argument. it's often seen as evading the point that the other person made (because you don't have a good answer for it), although it can also be just due to poor logic, and due to talking on the basis of emotion rather than reason.
as an example your illogic, to be precise, and referring to both of our points that I quoted just above:
I talked about the future possibilities, and yet you are continuing to harp on the fact that that innovation has not happened yet. does the fact that something has not happened yet, mean that it can never happened in the future? jay. eff. cee. did people think that mobile phones would happen before they happened? or computers? or cars? or fridges? or so many other modern inventions? maybe for
some of those cases it was predicted, but not for all, damn sure of that. and I bet some of those at least were not needed or desired earlier. still they happened.
quoting one of your above points again, to make another very valid point:
>>Why would anyone want to do an audio-only interface? If there were a need or desire for it, it would have popped up somewhere else in society. It hasn't.
nonsense, on 2 counts:
1. so you think that if there's a need or desire for something in society, it will automatically "pop up"? by the grace of god, maybe?
2. you say it hasn't.
here is another hn user, NotMichaelBay, in this same subthread, who says that it already exists:
>That already exists too, but it's also poor UX because it processes your response slower than a person would, and it sometimes misunderstands what you're saying or asks you to repeat.
so he says that it already exists. I don't think he would be making it up. but to address his point about UX, I think his argument that it is poor UX may be wrong. however I have not replied to it yet and may not do it for some more hours, because I have other things to do too.
but in a nutshell:
voice recognition and voice processing technology has progressed in leaps and bounds. it is much better than it was a few years back. I used to be a skeptic about it then, but nowadays it is so good that I use it many times on a daily basis, including for voice typing these hn comments, at least partially. I just have to make a few edits to correct the mistakes that it makes.
this is an example of a need and a desire (referring to your comment above), that I, at least, did not know about beforehand, but happily use once it is available. but it did not pop up in society just because I needed it or desired it. it happened because someone innovated it.
I the Alexa app is also awful. Doesn’t follow any sort of standard design language, doesn’t seem updated in years and fails to help you understand the capability of the device.
Something simple like “alert me if my door is unlocked” using a ring device is impossible.
I think the move to subscriptions makes a ton of sense from a business perspective. But what value add will they offer that is going to motivate people to buy subscriptions?
Maybe it can get bundled into the smart doorbell / camera video storage subscriptions?
Good question. Seems to suffer from same fate. Spot checking 2 years of order history across 2 common personal care products shows at least a 30% variation in price
If that's true, I don't get it is Amazon being metrics driven company didn't see the pattern Alexa is not being used for ordering or orders from Alexa devices is pretty insignificant? Even in 10 years?
I think they're moving that way with charging for Amazon music. They could just bundle Amazon music and smarthome features into a little package and probably get some sales
Add to that that ordering stuff without explicitly stating the total, final price to the customer is illegal in the EU, that was never even going to work everywhere at all...
> 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.
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.
What works for a person works of course, but pulling out my phone and just holding down a button and saying "add onions to shopping list" is very helpful halfway through cooking some stuff in a kitchen.
Of course I could put that on my fridge and have a marker. But it's "I need my list right now and have almost no free hands to do this" in other parts of the house too (toilet paper etc). Meanwhile my phone is always in my pocket.
Maybe time to just keep a pocket pad + pencil in my pocket though...
They saw “voice” as the next “mobile” and tried to take it over the way Meta wants VR now. The idea of owning a platform the way Apple owns iOS is what drives these companies to delusion.
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.
I recently build some smart controls for my residence. Alexa understands the words "Alexa, tell the device to run" about 2/3 of the time, which is infuriating. The other third of the time you end up with "Announcing, 'tell the device to run.'" Put any white noise in the background, a fan blowing, a tea kettle boiling, anything at all, and recognition drops to below 50%. But google isn't any better.
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.
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.
That sounds really noble, but unfortunately, the world revolves around money. It's not just the psychopath hedge funds investors, a sweet old lady living next door to you would start killing and stealing if she suddenly wouldn't have anything to eat.
Other systems like communism floped and failed royally. Feufalism or slavery are out of question, they are pure vomit, even though Russians live under feudalism.
Business and charity are different things, you can't mix them.
Alexa is a lame product. People still have it simply because they feel bad about throwing it out. No one wants smart homes, people want cheap and affordable homes. No customer wants quick or convenient buying process, people are looking for cheap or at least not overpriced products and services instead. And putting way too sophisticated AI in Alexa would be stupidly expensive.
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
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.
Throwaway, used to work at the NLU unit of Alexa about 5 years ago. There is some ML going on but as with all ML projects I have worked on people want control. This means you add rules for the "important" stuff. You also add test cases to make sure the ML works. But if you already have those test cases, why not just match on them directly? There are also advanced techniques for generating examples (FST for example).
What this culminated in is a platform where 80% of request, and pretty much 99% of "commands" are served by rules built with a team of linguists.
Is this not actually kind of powerful? Having linguists write up a bunch of rules seems a lot more predictable than "rolling a bunch of dice and hoping that some LLM spits out a coherent set of steps".
It feels very fractal but on the other hand if Alexa has only a specific gamut of responses it's not exactly a limitless state space right?
Very curious about how those rules look like though
The problem is it's completely undiscoverable. You can tell Alexa "play some music" because you're pretty sure one of these linguists added a rule for that. But can you tell it "play me a song that lasts longer than 5 minutes"? Doubtful. The only way to know is to try it.
The problem is the space of possible commands is waaaaay bigger than the space of commands you can manually handle, which means if you just randomly try stuff 95% of the time it won't work. Users learn that very quickly and end up sticking to the few commands they know work.
The one exception is "search" queries - "how tall is Everest" and so on, but that only really works well on Google's platform because they've done all the work for that already.
Contrast that with LLMs which basically at least understand everything you're asking of them. If you give them a simple API to carry out actions they can do really complex commands like "send a WhatsApp to my wife telling her how when I'll get home if I start cycling in 10 minutes". That's impossible without LLMs but pretty trivial with them.
Obviously the downside is they are prone to bullshitting and might do completely the wrong thing.
It’s worse than that. These systems can be adapted by looking at failed user commands, but people don’t really sit around trying out fun things and watch it fall on its face for longer than the first day or so. After that, the novelty wears off, so you’ve trained your users to accept the device’s limitations. Then, even when you do improve the functionality, your users won’t know! They won’t try it, and those commands will never get traction in the system or get more testing beyond the initial launch criteria. It’s a death spiral. The same thing happens with the tone of voice people use.
I am confused as to why it's more undiscoverable than, say, some LLM.
> The problem is the space of possible commands is waaaaay bigger than the space of commands you can manually handle, which means if you just randomly try stuff 95% of the time it won't work. Users learn that very quickly and end up sticking to the few commands they know work.
This is not strictly true. Context free grammars can be written to handle (finite) sentences of arbitrary length! if you have a rule like "play me <song>" and then <song> can be "a song that lasts longer than X" or "a song by <artist>" (then you have <artist> be "<some name>" or "some German singer" or whatever....). You can just keep on going.
> The one exception is "search" queries - "how tall is Everest" and so on, but that only really works well on Google's platform because they've done all the work for that already.
Had a small Google Assistant thingy for years, and that search stuff works great, until it doesn't, and completely misses the mark. This immediately kills trust and reduces it to a gadget that I will only use for non-critical stuff, always expecting it to break anyway.
> But can you tell it "play me a song that lasts longer than 5 minutes"?
I don't think even pre-LLM technology allows you to do this.
I can't do something as basic as goto Spotify's search page and filter "only genres I like", neither a smart version of that filter or a manual version of that filter is possible.
Honestly the FSTs themselves were actually really cool, it's very much GOFAI. It automatically creates lots of permutations, i.e. `play taylor swift`, `please play taylor swift`, play taylor swift now`. etc. And once the FST is built it always works deterministically. It's compiled to a graph and an incoming command is pushed through the state machine, if you get to an end state it "matched the fst" and some specific behaviour would be triggered.
the rule were really just strings and we had efficient matching against it. I didn't work on that, I would assume some sort of LHS.
Was there a knowledge engine of some sort in the past? I could ask it some questions like “what color is a light red flower” and I would get back “a pink flower is pink.” Asking what color a purple cat was would get back purple… but asking what color a blue bird was would get back “a blue bird is blue, red, and brown.”
“Who has birthdays today?” And I would get a list of famous people with birthdays today. I could also ask if Alice and Bob (two names in the list) had the same birthday and I would get an answer (one time I think I got back some internal query language for it instead… but that’s lost in old bug reports).
Now any interesting question starts its answer with “according to an Alexa answers contributor…”
> You also add test cases to make sure the ML works. But if you already have those test cases, why not just match on them directly?
Kind of says it all.
At the end of the day if you have a complex product but don't have comprehensive test cases, it's just a matter of time until your users notice your product sucks.
IMO with my experience with siri being AI-style unreliable in many ways, like bit flips when saying turn off the lights makes the dimmer go to %100, I think it's better to do the switch statement for the dozen or so query types that probably represent %90 of traffic, like weather, music, home control, unit conversions, etc in exchange for way more reliability.
I think describing the NLU Engine as a switch statement is underselling it a bit. Determining domain and intent alone requires more than that (frequently, at least).
Not like that, but once you get to first party Alexa Skill themselves there's a bunch of match rules that make up a big chunk of the traffic. Don't know exactly how much. The longtail is done through ML means.
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.
My optimistic side tells me that Blue Origin was founded as a tech lab / app lab / skunkworks and not necessarily as a company with the goal of putting humans in space, that has suffered from said bullshitting. But my cynical side tells me the latter.
> 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.
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.
Clearly the feedback loop is too long currently. If we could instantly dispense diapers onto the baby as soon as it started crying, that would improve learning outcomes and encourage experimentation.
Babies who cry a little at a time will be awash with diapers, leading to secondary market opportunities. Now we just need a two-sided marketplace to capture that business and charge a modest fee.
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?"
"Your baby is crying because you often raise your voice and make unreasonable demands of those around you. Would you like to add insurance for a lifetime of psychiatric help to your cart?"
This sounds like a joke but Amazon made a device specifically to listen to people talk all day and tell them how they sound to others. It is called Halo.
It wasn't for diaper ordering, Alexa has a feature to detect particular sounds (like glass breaking, dog barking etc) for monitoring and alerting purposes. Basically it involved adding hotword recognition for not just the N number of hotwords but also Y number of sounds for particular devices.
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
I am actually surprised that there are thousands of people working on Alexa.
WTF are they all doing?! It's pretty much unchanged from the outside in any way that's relevant to me compared to where it was in 2014. And the few changes I've noticed have been things breaking.
I used to, for instance, have a script (I forget the Alexa term) that would turn off a few lights and then play a Pandora radio station when I gave it a "bedtime" command. Worked great for about a year, and then the Pandora plugin suddenly refused to take any combination of commands that I could figure out to play a particular Pandora station in my account. This is true from outside of the automation as well, by the way. It's just completely broken.
The weather app integration is annoying too. I wanted weather to use a different weather source, and instead of just giving me results from that weather source, it would always preface it with "Weather from BlueSky" or whatever. Maybe it's their fault and they wanted the ad blurb? But as a consumer, it sucked. I just wanted more localized weather, not an ad every time I asked for the weather.
And the "AI" behavior of the app...it was just awful. I could get better answers from Google Home devices across the board. The best Alexa would do if I asked it a question is to read the first paragraph of a Wikipedia entry, and it was about a 1 in 4 chance it would actually choose the correct Wikipedia entry.
OH, and don't get me started on the Android Alexa app (!!!). Again, the most major change was a UI update where the most important feature I ever use was hidden behind another layer of menus for no particularly good reason. And the "Kindle Accessibility" feature of reading Kindle books is so flaky I doubt anyone on the team ever uses it, from random pauses to sudden jumps back to read from the beginning of the section of the book you started on 10 minutes ago, looping forever on those same 10 minutes.
Sorry. I know it wasn't your fault. But I finally gave up on using Echo devices, and the only reason I still even have the Alexa app on my phone any more is so I can have it read a Kindle book while I'm driving, and it's so amazingly frustrating to use that it would likely be better if it didn't even exist. It's more "customer frustration" than useful.
My take on it was that Alexa was developed at a time they were trying really hard to solidify their continued existence as a tech company; AWS and kindle came around then too. The stock market values tech companies much higher than retail companies. That’s what justified the headcount expense
Yeah, it’s just how I remember it. It was a period of time, not a moment. A bit longer apart than i remembered but that phase of amazons management and growth felt like a cohesive moment to me as an outside observer. Their strategy has changed since then. And have they released much new tech that wasn’t expansion or iterations of those?
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.
> 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.
I can't really evaluate you since you want to stay anonymous, but you're not really giving any credibility here. FAANG being arrogant isn't really any different than flavor-of-the-year tech startup being arrogant. There are numerous stories of high-flying startups that went bankrupt a few years after rejecting an acquisition offer, including significantly multiplying their valuation and raising capital along the way. You're also in an infamously overvalued sector.
I wish you all the best but try not to fall prey to the same mindset you're criticizing Amazon for.
Thanks for writing that. It may be that Alexa made the right decision to pass (time will tell, you're right the valuation itself isn't the best barometer) but the point of my post was simply that the Alexa leadership team felt very arrogant and disrespectful regardless of whether they made the right decision. They acted like we needed them, whereas in my opinion time has shown it was more the opposite.
I can't speak for all startups, but at my company we treat even the tiniest startups with respect, and even if we can't work together we wouldn't approach that decision the way Alexa did.
Anyway, as I mentioned in another comment, the past is the past. The Alexa leadership team is being shaken up and I wish them the best going forward. Just sharing my experience here because it's relevant to the thread.
This is wonderful to hear thanks for mentioning it. My last position as a software engineer at a very well known company I was in countless meetings where third parties or contracting companies were treated downright disrespectfully. Any time I brought this factor up to management or co-workers I was looked at like I was speaking a foreign language. Even in fast paced engineering environments, there is never room for disrespect. I enjoy stories like this and wish you and your company the best.
> Our software could have radically accelerated and improved the Alexa experience basically overnight
By improve the Alexa experience, do you mean make it more useful for users or help it shift more chineseware for Amazon? Because as a user, I will never order anything without seeing a picture and reading reviews, voice shopping is dead on arrival
If it's the former, I imagine it's Alexa hooked up to some gimmicky LLM, and I don't see where the actual profit comes from, I would have laughed and left the room too
It's not Alexa hooked up to some gimmicky LLM. I don't want to give away too many details given that this is a throwaway account, but the way Alexa's ecosystem works is they have "skills" Alexa users can instantiate. Our API would have increased the utility (and therefore usage) of some of the top skills by quite a lot.
I think of the Alexa team the same way I think of juiced up bodybuilders who think they can beat up anyone even though they've never trained MMA. The Alexa team looks in the mirror and sees big muscles, but they don't know how to use those muscles to fight. Yes, the strength and muscle helps, but ultimately to do well at MMA you have to develop specific skills, and you need to start with humility.
Anyway, the past is the past. It sounds like Jassy is focused on turning around this division, which is a good thing IMO.
We're still tiny compared to Alexa, but we have over a million MAUs so we're not tiny for a startup.
At present, Alexa itself is not a direct competitor, although a large and growing use-case for Alexa skills would benefit directly from our tech. This may change if Alexa gets its act together, but based on the past year I'm not holding my breath!
I call businesses like that Llama's. When a Llama (the creature) generally starts getting friendly towards someone it means they are about to get nasty and attack/spit in your face.
Amazon and Microsoft are two great examples of this. When they get close to you be weary. Go for the buy out or watch out for them trying to get ideas to steal.
>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."
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.
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...
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.
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.
I wanted concrete examples, I see I could have been clearer on that point but I did not intend malice or to brag.
I memorize because of diabetes. You need to know how much sugar you eat so you do volume -> weight * carbs/weight * portion size to calculate how much insulin you are supposed to give for a meal. That is not because of cooking and having tried doing that with voice assistant several times I know it is hard to get correct numbers.
I have no idea how many cups are in a pint. I have no idea how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon, or how many tablespoons are in a cup, or frankly any of the other byzantine imperial measures.
The only thing I'm reasonably sure of is that there are four quarts in a gallon - and yet, I would only bet $10 on that, not $20.
I probably ask Alexa how many oz in cup or how many cups/oz in a gallon once a month but have yet to commit it to memory. I have no need to memorize this stuff when I have the internet available.
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.
I do not understand how a voice assistant help with this, it has never worked for me. Seems like pretty hard things to do on the fly with recipes.
Weight to volume conversions are rare here but sure I do those on the fly so I guess it makes sense, do you really do you guys really do it that often? If you do extensive conversions of recipes you will need to get the ratios correct as well it is just not something I see myself doing with a voice assistant.
> I do not understand how a voice assistant help with this, it has never worked for me.
What do you mean it has never worked? What do you ask your assistant, and what does it respond?
> Seems like pretty hard things to do on the fly with recipes.
What's hard? I don't understand. If you need a quantity in unit x, but you only have a measuring cup or spoon in unit y, then you ask for the conversion and then you measure out that amount in unit y.
I genuinely don't understand the difficulties you seem to be encountering.
> do you really do you guys really do it that often?
If I have a measuring cup that maxes at at one cup, and I need to add a pint of something to a pot on the stove, being able to say "Hey Jibble, how many cups are in a pint" and getting an answer would be pretty nifty.
As things stand, I walk over to the conversion chart hanging on the fridge.
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.
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.
That is probably it, never would have occurred to me. When doing international recipes doing a translation/conversion is not always straight forward. I cook a lot and often it becomes a investigation into the ingredients and what to replace rather than a simple conversion of units. Not something Alexa does.
It's a real problem for all countries not using the metric system, so, uhhh... the US, Liberia, and Myanmar. If the units have no meaningful way of conversation, like gallons, ounces, pounds, cups, and so on, cooking can get hard.
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
> siri was (still is?) shockingly inept when it specifically came to setting multiple timers, adjusting timer duration, cancelling timers, etc
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this Apple AI leap will bring us a less stupid Homepod Mini so I can throw away my Alexas. It's almost 4 years old with zero refreshes, still running on the S5 chip from Apple Watch 5.
The only things we use our Alexas are pretty much: turn on/off lights in the room it's in, ask for the weather and timers. Homepods can do the first two, but the timers are pretty useless unless one is enough.
My Sonos Era 100s have the alexa integration and have my spotify account linked to them. You just gave me an idea!
... except, my Sonos Roam responded, and started playing. Not my stereo pair of era 100s on my desk. Let alone all the speakers in my house.
tried again. "I didn't find anything called "office speakers" in your music library". To be fair, she suggested setting up multi-room in the alexa app, which I suppose I could do.
ha, this is too typical. we have a super poor man's version of multi-room speakers (two shitty-sounding echos!) and whenever I try and throw the music from one to the other with a voice command Alexa just doesn't get it. I end up just going back into Spotify and manually tapping on the other room. of course now you have me fantasizing about having the sound of Sonos speakers; glad to hear someone has enough sense to optimize their music-listening experience.
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.
Yep, it's these simple thingsthat are actually the killer features for me. Alexa is so cheap too (often given away free with other products like ring cameras) that I have them in most rooms.
Mainly I just use them as alarms, timers, a talking clock and for listening to radio. I occasionally ask it what time a local shop may close or similar.
For the little money I've spent on them I'm perfectly happy using them in such a superficial manner, they make life a little tiny bit easier and that's ok.
I'd hate to have it on another appliance because appliance manufacturers would love to have another avenue to get me to use their cloud-connected products.
I bought a kitchen sink faucet that has a sensor and you just wave your hand in front of it and it runs the water and wave again and it stops. It is such a good feature I never realized I didn't have. Dirty chicken hands no need to touch the handle before or after. Pump the soap with my forearm and clean my hands.
Id love to buy a voice activated timer that didn’t require an internet connection, but I’m guessing that once you pack in enough compute to do language transcription on the device you can’t help but stack on lots of other features and complicate the whole thing
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.
Maybe it's because I've worked in food service but if you have "gross cooking hands" you really ought to be washing them before doing anything else. I suppose that a voice-assisted timer could allow you to multi-task so you set it on your way to the sink to wash up, but I don't see how that's a big selling point. At least not for anyone who cooks in a kitchen that I would want to eat food out of. I mean, it's not solving a problem that I've ever heard anyone in a professional kitchen preparing hundreds of plates per service complain about. In that setting "gross kitchen hands" gets called a "potential health code infraction."
Let's say he's cooking lutefisk. It has alkaline, so he'd destroy the Alexa by touching it. But his hands are free of bacteria, so are they really gross? It might not be the health code that applies, but something like the ChemG:
I wonder how feasible it would be these days to create a single-purpose voice-controlled kitchen timer product, at a price the market would like? Sounds like it might do well... unless nobody needs it cause they already have Alexa!
But yeah, I think a lot of Alexa's get used mainly for kitchen timers!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is 99% of the use of our kitchen Alexa (29€ on Prime Day, delivered). The multiple named timers are extremely useful.
I set up the smart home stuff once, but keeping it updated with the crappy mobile app is a huge chore, most of my stuff is in Home Assistant and HomeKit, which are a lot easier to keep updated.
I'm just hoping for a Homepod 2.0 so I can throw away all Alexas and replace them with Homepods.
I love using my Echo while cooking in the kitchen. Timers, music, news. All great features while my hands are occupied and covered with chicken grease or whatever.
the timer on my phone stay with me. put something in the oven for an hour, I won't be in tbe kitchen an hour later but my phone will be with me telling me to go to the kitchen
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think an under appreciated part of their most is that people hate logging in to things and making new accounts.
I know there have been times where I see a product is a little cheaper on the actual brand website but I decide to just order with Amazon rather than creating an account to place a single order on the other site.
I tell myself that it’s about privacy and minimizing exposure to future breaches, but really it’s just that I don’t want to go through the whole create a password/enter your card and address/wait for marketing emails you need to unsubscribe from loop
For me it's just about time and laziness. I accept for large and specialized purchases, it's worth potentially going to someplace else to buy something. But for some run of the mill $20 item? I probably spend a few minutes on Amazon and call it a day. I usually get the item in a day or two and, if I don't? It's still probably faster than I would get it elsewhere and it probably doesn't matter.
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.
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)
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?
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.
Not arguing with your anecdote, but I expect LLMs to respond better with question type queries. Due to learning with books, I tend to use a keyword based to my search, and while reading I tend to collect technical terms as that how they will be referred most of the times. As for your example, I would type "c++ string literal std::string" as the query. Or I'd probably look for the documentation of std::string and seek the answer there.
Why? Because books, articles, and documentation often have related pieces of knowledge next to each other. It's like experiencing a whole journey instead of a short slideshow of pictures and video clips. Maybe that one specific answer is all you needed, but having the complete picture helps me refine my ideas better.
DuckDuckGo (What I use) is still useful for me. I either know the resources I'm looking for or I'm hoping someone has written about it. And the keyword based approach works great. It's like the index at the end of the book and it's table of content. You look at them to see if what you're seeking in in this book and where. It's just a short stop to the actual information.
String literals are not const char *, but const char[] in C++. They decay to a pointer when you pass them to the std::string constructor that takes one.
Different people learn and approach problems differently.
I haven't taken any programming courses since high-school. But I also very rarely use search engines or LLMs when I'm writing code, even in a language that is new to me.
My preferred approach to learning new languages or frameworks is typically to begin by reading the documentation. If that is not a sufficient enough deep dive because I'm approaching some ginormous "ecosystem" language like Java where I need to learn tons of new concepts to get started then I'll reach for a textbook.
I have tried to get into using LLMs, especially because so many of my coworkers rave about them and they take it for granted that everyone else uses copilot or claude because they use them so much. But I don't find any utility in using copilot (or whatever the JetBrains equivalent is) and I've found that LLMs in general are so hit or miss for me that they have become my last resort for searching for information when all else has failed.
My coworkers often talk about how copilot is like a very advanced auto-complete and that it saves them having to look things up on StackOverflow and copy/paste from there ... but I can probably count the number of times that I've looked something up on StackOverflow over the past 10 - 15 years on one hand, and I've never copy/pasted any code .. not once, ever. Typically I find myself actively searching for solutions when I've come across some weird compiler or framework error that I've never seen before and need to search for that specific error string (in which case a traditional search engine beats an LLM 10/10 times).
The app can do speech-to-text, and text-to-speech using their whisper model, and it's integrated with chatgpt.
On May 13th, they demoed GPT-4o's multi-modal voice capabilities, and it's much better than a text/speech model.
Converting speech to text, and vice versa, is quite lossy, all the tone and emotion of the speech is lost in translation, the model they demoed in May was capable of much more than whisper is.
It's silly but having the Apple robot or Google robot put stuff into your Apple shopping list or Google shopping list is a pretty good ecosystem play, right? Like how people get kinda locked in with photo sharing and airplay and friends.
Like if both environments feel equivalent but one has a better speaker setup (or inversely if one environment feels better and both have equivalent-feeling speakers) now you're locked in? It's good marketing I guess? Very hand-wave-y
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.
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?
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.
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.
Investors hallucinating large windfalls and users who want to believe in miracles and/or are just ignorant. How many people know that LLMs are just text completion engines and cannot do reasoning or math or have a concept of truth?
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.
90% of our education system is really just watching over the kids/teenagers so they don't cause trouble while parents are at work. I don't see AI doing that.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Tie it to an as-yet-unknown startup company that sends people to your house very quickly to perform individual light housekeeping tasks. "MicroMaids.com" or some such.
Sounds invasive and scary, but I would've said (and probably did say) similar things about a service that connected you with strangers for the purpose of getting into their cars.
That's an easy route to a 10- or 11-figure company with a huge liability policy and a very fat band of warm bodies in the middle that all conspires to mean both high prices, and minimal pay with terrible terms for those doing the work -- just like Uber.
Other than the fact that it broadly sounds awful, I don't see a downside. I'd sometimes love to have such a service myself: I have plenty of money to buy services and very little time when I'm busy, but when I'm not busy I have plenty of time to do these things myself, which I prefer. Hiring things to be done on a regular schedule doesn't really work for me.
But an informally-arranged, impromptu service? Maybe?
---
"Alexa, mow the lawn."
"OK. Greenscape will arrive today between 3 and 4PM to mow the lawn. By the way, did you know that Husqvarna offers automated electric lawnmowers? Would you like to know more?"
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
IMO Alexa is just a bad product, which Amazon thought scale scale scale instead of finding value and product market fit. So many things that it does is better than predecessors, but overall is subpar and didn't get better over time.
Ex. Music. Bread and butter for Alexa. Conversion opportunity to Amazon Music. Conversion opportunity for podcasts, news, so much... Try asking Alexa to play new music, something different, slow jazz, I didn't like that song, play something like blah, etc... Most of these queries do not work. It's such a POS.
Ex. Proactive notifications. Alexa routinely informs me that diapers or something else from my routine purchases is likely running out and I should refill them. I've used this feature 100s of times in the 7+ years I've owned Alexa. I'm sure the LTV I've given Amazon is hell a lot more than most Alexa users. That being said, I can get so many more recommendations than just the 1-2 things in my routine purchase history.
I could go on and on. Ultimately, like many products by large companies, Amazon had a product that received early success because of novelties like hands-free music, alarms, timers - but never found more utility beyond that. Instead of doubling down on discovery, they worked on scaling out the platform and opening it up to 3P developers. The platform they exposed was limited in frustrating ways, and ultimately did not help them discover any hidden gem skills.
IMO the smart home virtual assistant is ripe for easy disruption. Throw out Amazon's model and use ChatGPT / Anthropic instead. Keep the 3P plugins. This fusion would be a sufficiently better product than what's in the market today.
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.
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.
I'm pretty sure this occurs when the timer goes off during your query, and the alarm gets queued after the response. In my experience the alarm usually goes off immediately after, though, I've never experienced a 30s delay.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Around 15 years ago, as a semi-joke, my Mother bought a wireless doorbell and put the speaker in my brother's room to announce dinner was ready. It turned out to be quite handy actually. I think Alexa is a bit overkill for that usecase.
> 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.
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.
If Amazon wants to continue to recoup this investment from Alexa sales, Amazon needs totally different leadership on the Alexa team. Alexa's app and user experience are terrible. Adding a skill is a highly convoluted process.
Most notably and most recently, the decision to drop access from 3rd party apps to its lists is an incredibly short-sighted idea. No one wants to use Amazon's software. Make Alexa effortless to use with 3rd party software.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/31/24168681/amazon-alexa-thi...
The UI is hilariously bad. I’m playing a NY Times podcast and say “Alexa, pause.” Two minutes later, I say “Alexa, play” and it starts playing some random news clip from ABC News.
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.
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.
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.
Instead of being a dick you could have searched for "Alexa set volume to a value less than 1" on Google. Multiple reddit threads with exactly the same problem.
Have you actually checked that "Set volume to 15%" will set it to 15% in the Alexa app?
Which is fine (although these routines are very slow, which makes it awkward to use for volume adjustments), but why make things so complicated when the possibility to adjust the volume in 1% steps via the app and 3% via buttons exist?
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.
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.
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).
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?)
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.
This is hysterical. I never owned one until I worked on the product because I worried it was always recording/transmitting. Turns out it’s not. Promise.
You don’t need a shadowy government cabal to explain Alexa persisting too long in the strategy described in the article. Just a powerful chief executive with an attachment to the product, the sunk cost fallacy, a company with too much revenue to know what to do with, some gameable downstream impact metrics, the inertia of large institutions, and empire building.
It still could’ve become an incredible product if they’d gotten on the LLM chat/agent train early enough, but alas. I mostly use mine to set timers when my hands are full in the kitchen.
To be sure, it's not shadowy. You can track awarded contracts. You can track employment of persons from 3-5 letter agencies into private sector. You can look on Amazon Science page from 2019, where plans for "ambient intelligence" begin.
Engineers thought they were building a totally above-water secure corporate internal messaging app and service.
Actual users and customers were mostly organized crime.
Unbeknownst to anyone byut the founder and their lawyer, the whole thing was backdoored and all messages were forwarded in cleartext to the FBI (supposedly they started dark, got caught by the feds on something and struck a deal). They had an entire team of analysts with purpose-built tooling just to digest the material. Who knows what the same teams are working on today...
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.
If that makes it more palatable for you, then I understand why you need to prioritize this level of reasoning.
Amazon culture is fail fast. Not many products at Amazon last this long, boasting multi-billion dollar losses YoY. Name another product at Amazon that does this, for this long.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?..
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.
I think another problem is just a general lack of value. Why should the average person care about a 1% gain in convenience and adjust just to appease some C-suite delusion? It's like they all want to be Steve Jobs without offering any significant value to back it up
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.
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.
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.
The amount of awareness and integration with its revenue streams makes it a loss leader. It equally helps tie people into that ecosystem. So it's an underrated appreciated marketing budget more than a loss.
Now they can and should have added functionality(worthwhile pay for add ons) earlier and then, Alexa does have some basic flaws in dialogue, like try and ask it for the wind direction without being subjected to a weather forecast that tells you everything but the wind direction. Then the pet peeves for example - Ask for the time, you get the time, and you politely say thank you, to which Alexa responds "Anytime".
But with the processing done at a backend, they do have an opportunity via ease of access and user-base to jump into the AI personal assistant race, if they price it right. Which is what seems afoot, though the price will be key here.
I think the fundamental issue with Alexa is that Amazon is trying to answer the question "how can we use it to sell more shit?" instead of trying to answer "how can we make people's lives better by adding more value than any other assistant in the marketplace?"
With the latest open-webui, I have an always available voice mode assistant with a real LLM that is smarter than Alexa running locally. And I can be sure I'm not being spied upon.
Amazon is not losing billions, Amazon is still wildly profitable! And the "loss leader" devices like Kindle, Alexa etc. helped to get it where it is now, even if the devices themselves generate losses. I think this new strategy is more "now that we are the undisputed online shopping monopolist, do we still need these loss leaders, or can we eliminate them in order to be even more profitable?"
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd love to have spent more on Alexa, but having trust in the quality and pricing was critical to me so I stopped ordering after they messed it up a few times. I now verify my purchases on the website to ensure the bulk facial tissues (or whatever) are actually the cheapest and most legitimate listing for the brand I want.
Our company was acquired by Amazon in 2017 to help power Alexa's general knowledge / informational answers, and that's pretty much what we did. I only stayed for 15 months after acquisition though.
I hope the product burns. For the simple fact that it was such a huge oversight to use a popular human name for a home assistant product. Really just such an extremely stupid thing to do.
It is not but i know two people who are named that. The jokes get old and it’s even worse when you have the stupid devices go off all the time when people use their names. One of them just switched to using their middle name because they got so sick of it.
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.
> Amazon’s devices operation was a pet project of Bezos
And he saw it as his way to be Steve Jobs instead of Sam Walton. Bezos got bored with it when it was clear it wasn't working and left the hard work of cleaning up his mess to his successor. It seems clearer than ever that the low interest rates and creative accounting which let Amazon grow like this is not something to admire.
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.
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.
Cancelled Amazon two years ago after they banned me because the Amazon credit card on file was expired and they continued billing it.
Woke up to a house full of Alexa devices that couldn’t tell time. A banned account is the same as no internet access. Actually we overslept because none of the alarms worked.
None of this really surprises me but Amazon’s walled garden has really went down in quality.
My kids have grown up with Alexa devices. They use them as speakers, to listen to Audible, and as ways to communicate with us. I've been under the belief that the devices do not spy on us, based on a few test articles I read. If I ever heard that that was not the case I'd jettison them all from the house.
You're very trusting. I won't let alexa in my home, let alone near my kids.
How do you trust something that you can't know what is being done (ie recorded for later, later use - see the github nodelete stories) with it?
I'm not that trusting. I just think that if it came out that Alexa devices were recording outside of their wake word then it would do tremendous damage to the brand and they'd not want to risk it. I feel like the incentives are aligned in this case.
I don't consider data collection and targeting from data collected during the wake word to be spying.
I think it's a subjective call on what you consider spying. Amazon and its integrations / 3rd parties are certainly using what they can gather based on Alexa interactions to better sell and serve their ad ecosystem at minimum right? And I've never seen someone leave theirs muted/red in practice.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10920 among others are certainly available in this question space to help navigate your own tolerances.
Simple fix - First 2 years of Alexa are free, then you have two-tier pricing for prime / non-prime members for annual fee. In a few months, they can start getting revenue for any device that's been active more than 2 years.
Best case scenario - it turns into a profit center.
Worst case scenario, the platform is abandoned, and Amazon can stop bleeding.
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.
Won one at a work raffle. Only reason I have one. Good for timers, weather checking, Amazon notifications like package deliveries, and some quiz games are decently engaging while you wait for food to sauté.
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."
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
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.
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
Amazon must create a need in the marketplace for people to want to use and buy these products in order to be profitable. Like Apple with Apple watch or Airpods.
Sometimes I think about the billions of dollars invested in stupid marginal tech like voice assistants, or boilerplate spreadsheet replacement SaaS and wonder if capitalism has failed. Why is this money not being invested in something that is obviously more desperately needed, like building more housing? As this article pointed out, some of this stupid marginal tech like Alexa isn't even making a profit, Amazon is *loosing* billions on it. Then why do this? We have real crises facing us, like climate change and the housing crisis and war, and meanwhile YC is funding "developer tooling". As if what society needs most right now is that developers with 6-figure salaries need to make their already cushy jobs slightly easier with some IDE widget.
smart-home stuff was always a bit „off“ to me and. Why would I want to control light by voice? It’s much better to do this by motion detection. Same for shutters: time + light detection is much better than saying anything. I want the smart-home to automatically do stuff not just a different „switch“
> 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.
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).
> 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.
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).
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
