Amazon Lost $sim$$10$millions of a decade ago: Listening to the Scientists and Theoretical Experts on Alexa’s Science Project

The first Amazon Echo, all the way back in 2014, was pitched as a device for a few simple things: playing music, asking basic questions, getting the weather. Since that time, Amazon has found new ways to make life easier for people. A decade ago, she was more interested in playing music, asking questions, and getting the weather. And that’s largely because, even as Amazon made Alexa ubiquitous in devices and homes all over the place, it never convinced developers to care.

Many of these devices were forgettable, did little to advance Alexa’s capabilities, and mostly served to lose Amazon money. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Amazon lost tens of billions of dollars on its broader devices unit.

Alexa, tell my son not to forget his science project; set the alarm when he leaves. Remove the alarm and then lock the back door for the plumbing professional at 5PM. If I run late, preheat the oven to 377 degrees, then adjust the time.

Amazon isn’t going to shut it, but you can always look at it when you are: How smart is your home? What kind of voice assistants should you use?

Amazon does not give you any access to your personal life beyond what you buy in its store or select data you give it access to. And its privacy missteps have kept people from trusting it.

This would be a big leap in the right direction. But while generative AI could make voice assistants smarter, it’s not a silver bullet. There is a simple make sense of language problem and LLMs are able to solve it, but they don’t have the ability to act on that language.

Hearing “‘Lamp’ isn’t responding. Please check its network connection and power supply” after issuing a command is beyond frustrating. It wasn’t part of the promise, when you spend hours a month configuring your smart home. This is what a smart computer should be able to do for you.

Amazon vs. the Echo: My Mother’s Day with a Stereo System for a Simple, Complex Mom Needed to Play Music

In retrospect, Amazon’s idea was pretty much exactly right. All these years later, OpenAI and other companies are also trying to build their own third-party ecosystems around chatbots, which are just another take on the idea of an interactive interface for the internet. But for all its prescience on the AI revolution, Amazon never figured out how to make skills work. It never solved the fundamental problems for developers, never found a way to show people what the device can do and never cracked the user interface.

A few decades ago my parents bought a modular stereo system that included an AM/Fm radio, a cassette tape player and a turntable. My mother was too complex to deal with, and now it sat unused. But with the Echo, she could play music whenever she liked. She could not remember the name of the musicians she liked or the songs she liked. All she had to do was say, “Alexa, play some quiet music,” or “Alexa, play some happy music.” She would play music from the 1960’s or 70’s. And I’d get a call about how she had listened to her music and how good it made her feel.

Here’s how it started. My mother lived most of her life in the New York public schools system, a smart, savvy woman with a master’s in education, a progressive political point of view and a sometimes annoying ability to assume charge of almost any situation. She was now entering her late 90s and beginning to have health problems, like a short-term memory recall. Despite her determination to stay independent as long as possible — by playing games on her computer, keeping up with the news, and writing copious journal entries of her day-to-day activities — this increasingly affected her ability to do simple tasks, to learn new skills, and to live independently.

We hired an aide to help her during the day, when she was unable to do her own chores. My mom was stubborn and refused to have anyone at night or have an emergency button if she needed help. I lived about 40 minutes away and only spent weekends with her. She was the only one in the apartment and we needed a way to make sure she was ok.

Source: Alexa, thank you for the music

Do the Two Echoes Really Provide a Simple and Friendly Way for Me and My Mother to Communicate? Yes. No. Not!

Did the two Echos do everything I had hoped they would? Well, yes and no. They certainly gave my mother a simple and friendly way to get information and reminders. More importantly, they provided a way that she could contact me in an emergency. But I never found the time to install other smart setups that were available. It was too complex a task to be dealt with.

I thought we could communicate visually by using it. That was pretty much a failure. My mother was used to calling people on a phone, and while she was impressed with the whole “see the person you’re talking to” idea, she wasn’t very enthusiastic about using it herself. She said that it wasn’t for her.

I thought that there was a “drop-in” feature. I could use it to peek into the apartment. The only place in which my mother could see the show was the room off the kitchen we called “The Den”, where she stored her food and wrote about it in her journal. One time I suggested that I set up cameras around the apartment, I got a look that made me feel as if I’d just left five years ago. A camera in the bedroom? No way.

Amazon’s App Store for Making Skills Work: Answering the Whys and Whys with Facebook Ads ‘nearly Everyday’

It was Amazon that tried to make skills happen. The company paid developers with credits and cash when they used their skills and tried to make skill development very simple, but has recently stopped doing so. Amazon says there are more than 16,000 skills available for the platform, with all that effort paid off. That pales next to the millions of app store apps on smartphones, but it’s still a big number.

If you know the skill you’re looking for, the system is a little better. You can say “Alexa, open Nature Sounds” or “Alexa, enable Jeopardy,” and it’ll open the skill with that name. If you don’t know that you can use the skill ” Easy Yoga” to do yoga, you won’t get anywhere.

Volley is the company behind many of the most popular Alexa skills that are simple Q&A games. From Song Quiz to Jeopardy to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire to Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader, Volley is one of the companies that has figured out how to make skills that really work. And Max Child, Volley’s cofounder and CEO, says that getting your skill in front of people is one of the most important — and hardest — parts of the job.

He says that one of theunderappreciated reasons that the app stores are successful is because of Facebook ads. The pipeline from a hyper-targeted ad to an app install has been ruthlessly perfected over the years, and there’s just nothing like that for voice assistants. The nearest equivalent is probably people asking their Alexa devices what they can do — which Child says does happen! There is no competing with in-feed ads and hours of social scrolling. You end up having to do broad marketing because you don’t have hyper-targeted marketing. Hence games like Jeopardy and Millionaire, which are huge brands that appeal to practically everyone.

These are hardly unique challenges, by the way. Huge discovery problems, issues with monetization, and more are common in mobile app stores. It seemed like the solution was so easy, you shouldn’t even need an app store. You can ask for what you want, and Amazon will do it for you.