by dmschulman on 11/17/23, 3:44 PM with 109 comments
by ldjkfkdsjnv on 11/17/23, 4:42 PM
The flip side might be that Alexa was ahead of its time, and that the ML capabilities werent there. But I bet Alexa spent more than OpenAI by a huge margin. Amazon's fundamental flaw is trying to solve innovative business problems with incremental improvement. This only works in operations heavy businesses, like retail and AWS. AWS is really just extremely competent operations on top of server management.
The whole company is a meat grinder, poor technical implementations with an army of SDEs keeping it running. It definitely works, they ship product, but the company is underperforming the S&P for five+ years now. Walmart has higher shareholder returns. They need to flush out the legacy employees and make room for hungry young workers.
by rickspencer3 on 11/17/23, 4:18 PM
I assumed that both Amazon and Google were underwhelmed by how much actual revenue these kinds of devices produced, so they were starving the backend services.
Now it looks like both companies are hoping that Generative AI is going to make them more valuable [0]
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/01/google-reshuffles-assistant-...
by ssijak on 11/17/23, 4:37 PM
by cmpalmer52 on 11/17/23, 4:21 PM
It’s become second nature to say “Alexa, seven minute timer” while I’m cooking. Or “Alexa, add soy sauce to the shopping list” when I open the fridge and pull out an almost empty bottle.
by bentt on 11/17/23, 4:46 PM
Wouldn't be surprised to see them roll out a new optional Alexa OS upgrade that you can opt into which has a subscription fee attached and provides AI coolness.
by stronglikedan on 11/17/23, 4:50 PM
by ejb999 on 11/17/23, 4:07 PM
by oidar on 11/17/23, 5:17 PM
I'm still looking for another solution so I can get out of the hell of maintaining Alexa's random new notification setting of the day. I really hate all the new "suggestions" and new crap they keep shoving down your throat with no option to turn it off. I would pay a subscription to turn that it off the annoyance, but there is no option for it.
by itqwertz on 11/17/23, 4:48 PM
I gave it a shot for a year as a potential source of side income and released about 10 skills publicly (+20 more are half-done or abandoned).
I've learned quite a bit about this platform over the past few years. I'd say the only positives I got out of it are a monthly $50 credit on AWS and sporadic surveys that netted me anywhere from $5 - $50 each.
My notes:
- VUI is a terrible interface. There are too many variables (foreign accents, volume, word recognition, etc.) that just make it clunky and unusable. Testing and debugging in the Alexa Console does not work 100% like on a real device.
- The ISPs (In-Skill-Products) are confusing to developers and users. The documentation is often wrong.
- The Alexa forum posts are rarely addressed by anyone at Amazon. Instead, you start to see fellow developers venting their frustrations.
- The intent model and lack of state machine makes it incredibly difficult to make a skill worth someone paying for it. It wasn't uncommon for testing to work flawlessly and then the published skill would be so spotty as to be unusable. Imagine being in the middle of an Alexa game and then unceremoniously receiving a the default help response (required for Alexa skills) that restarts your progress.
- Alexa doesn't work like people expect it to. Again, the intent/slot paradigm is pretty terrible. There's a lot of grunt work to have it even recognize slight variations of slots, so you end up with a huge list of sample intents users could potentially use.
- Internationalization is a HUGE pain. There are different availabilities for ISPs, Alexa services, etc.
- The Alexa Console is very clunky. Today (just like every day), I loaded the Analytics for one of my skills and got a 500 error. Reloading two or three times usually solves this issue, but c'mon!
- Good luck trying to market your skill. You could game the system by publishing updates or implementing new Alexa features, but getting your skill onto someone's account is basically a guessing game of what will work or not.
- Amazon Skills are not very profitable for individual developers. This puts the platform in jeopardy, as only the big players care enough to have their brand out there and sole developers don't make enough to make useful Alexa skills.
- Other skill developers could just copy your skill and publish it! The certification process is weird and oftentimes seems to be arbitrary.
There's more I could gripe about, but I've abandoned the platform. I suspect that Amazon's real product was the unfettered access to real-world speech data. By having a surveillance device in a user's home, they were able to collect data and train their own software.
by dougmwne on 11/17/23, 4:20 PM
by someonehere on 11/17/23, 6:10 PM
I haven’t seen Alexa evolve that much but maybe someone who worked at Amazon can give more on what’s evolved.
by JCharante on 11/17/23, 5:40 PM
by ChrisArchitect on 11/17/23, 5:37 PM
by brycewray on 11/17/23, 4:15 PM
by fuddle on 11/17/23, 5:48 PM
by thatgerhard on 11/17/23, 6:03 PM