[sokoloff]

Amazon alone has sold over half-a-billion Alexa-enabled units (around 10 of them to me).

I think people see more than $30 of value in them, at least as their revealed preferences suggest.

[modeless]

Those sales were subsidized in expectation of future profitability that will never come (at least not without a ground-up redesign of the product around LLM-based AI agents or some other paradigm). Economically Alexa is a "colossal failure": https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co...

[pests]

Yeah, my crock pot and ceiling fan are "Alexa-enabled". That's two.