[karaterobot]

> Amid this news, a former Alexa colleague messaged me: “You’d think voice assistants would have been our forte at Alexa.”

I assume the goal of Alexa was never to be the top conversational system on the planet, it was to sell more stuff on Amazon. Apple's approach to making a friendly and helpful chat assistant helps keep people inside their ecosystem, but it's not clear how any skill beyond "Alexa, buy more soap" was going to contribute meaningfully to Alexa's success as a product from Amazon's perspective. I saw the part about them having a "how good at conversation is it" metric, but that cannot be the metric that leadership actually cared about, it was always going to be "how much stuff did we sell off Alexa". In other words, Amazon did not ever appear to be in the race to make the best voice assistant, and I'm not sure why they would want to be.

[robbiemitchell]

It wasn't even set up for success at selling.

After years of raising 3 kids, you would think if I ask to add diapers to the cart, it would know something. But no, it would just go with whatever is the top recommended, or first in a search, or something like that. Nothing using the brand or most recent sizes we purchased.

There was no serious attempt to drive real commerce. Instead, Alexa became full of recommendation slots that PMs would battle over. "I set that timer for you. Do you want to try the Yoga skill?"

On the other hand, they have taken on messy problems and solved them well, but not using technology, and for no real financial gain. For example, if you ask for the score of the Tigers game, Alexa has to reconcile which "Tigers" sports team you mean among both your own geography and the worldwide teams, at all levels from worldwide to local, across all sports, might have had games of interest. People worked behind the scenes to manage this manually, tracking teams of interest and filling intent slots daily.

[ClassyJacket]

The insane lack of basic heuristics in every day apps to do very obvious things like you mentioned baffles me. They can come up with huge scale fuzzy vector search AI suggestion systems for a billion users, but can't think to do stuff like, only suggest things available in your size?

I'm actually working on an app that solves this for a specific use case, tho it isn't in the retail space.

Voice assistants are particularly egregious - they've done all that work to correctly recognise the words I said - i.e. the hard part - but then it breaks because I said "set reminder" instead of "create reminder"??

[treflop]

My impression with a lot of products is that no one that is substantially involved in making them actually substantially uses them themselves.

[transcriptase]

I’m convinced nobody on the Google/Nest Home teams has ever used the product outside of testing in a VM.

[ngc248]

Product managers are no longer about the users. They just want to have some "impact" and then they move onto another product.

[watt]

Same when you know how the sausage is made.

[AbstractH24]

My question is always if it’s just the company I’m at or is it how the who industry is run? The more companies I work at the more i realize it’s the later.

On the flip side, it’s easy to take for granted what DOES work when you know how much better it could be. I was siting at dinner with an 73 year old man yesterday who could stop talking about how amazing Siri is cause it’ll tell him the population of some country.

[ozim]

That is when you force yourself and eat your own produced dogfood to make sure it is good.

But when $$$ are rolling in anyway who cares enough?

[threatofrain]

This only goes so far, trying to use your own head as a simulation or approximation of user experience. Some of us will be building software for people who we will never be in our lifetime.

[ghaff]

They're hard in different ways (and ML helped with voice recognition to a degree that PhD linguists struggled to do for years.

But to your example. OK. Set and create probably mean the same thing in the context of a reminder. Probably add and a few other things too. Should this go on some running ToDo list app I use? Should it ask me for a due date? Should it go on my calendar? And that's a very simple example.

[TeMPOraL]

> Should this go on some running ToDo list app I use? Should it ask me for a due date? Should it go on my calendar? And that's a very simple example.

Yes. If it isn't obvious from the context, it should ask.

What it should not do, is demand you to issue all your commands in format of "${brand 1}, do ${something} with ${brand 2} in ${brand 3}". That's what makes current voice assistants a cringe.

[TeMPOraL]

> Voice assistants are particularly egregious - they've done all that work to correctly recognise the words I said - i.e. the hard part - but then it breaks because I said "set reminder" instead of "create reminder"??

They hardly even managed the hard part. What's surprising for me is that for a year now, ChatGPT app has been miles ahead of SOTA in voice assistants in terms of speech-to-text with whatever the thing is they're using, and somehow none of the voice assistants managed to improve. OpenAI could blow them all out of the water today, if they delegated a couple of engineers to spend a week integrating their app deeper into Android intent system - and 90% of that wouldn't be because GPT-4, but because of speech-to-text model that doesn't suck donkey balls.

[lolinder]

> somehow none of the voice assistants managed to improve.

No one has been working on the old generation of assistants for years now. They all basically came to the conclusion that the architecture that everyone had settled on was a dead end and wouldn't get any better, so they directed their attention elsewhere.

Now Google is working on it again, but just using an LLM for better intent parsing isn't exciting enough to warrant attention, so in classic Google fashion they launched a brand new product (Gemini) that's going to run alongside Assistant for a few years confusing everyone until they yank Assistant (which still will have features that haven't been ported).

Apple seems to be working on improving Siri rather than starting fresh, but it's taken them a while to get it ready because Apple never moves on something fast.

[simiones]

Actually, speech-to-text benefits massively from a good language model. It's impossible to do speech to text if you don't understand the language. The better you understand the language and the context of what is being said, the better you will be at speech-to-text. So it's no surprise whatsoever to anyone that the best-in-class language model would have the best in class speech-to-text.

I think a lot of people underestimate how disconnected simple sound patterns are from human speech. It's hard if not impossible to even recognize word boundaries on a phonogram of regular human speech, even for highly eloquent speakers in formal settings. And many sounds are entirely ambiguous, people rarely understand the exact phonemes they use in practice. For example, most native English speakers pronounce the "peech" part of "speech" more like "beach" than like "peach", if you look at a phonogram [0]. Phonetics is really complicated, and varies far more between languages than people tend to assume.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U37hX8NPgjQ

[phatskat]

> but then it breaks because I said "set reminder" instead of "create reminder"??

Which is wild to me. If my Google home barely mishears “lights on”, I get random Spotify. But “cut the lights”? Works every time to turn them off

[shortrounddev2]

Buying the promoted products is the point; they get advertising revenue that way

[shortrounddev2]

If they rebuy your most recent purchase instead of the promoted brand, they don't get advertising revenue

[m463]

step 1: remove three sponsored diaper brands from the top of your cart...

[ghostly_s]

I laughed at this line: "Today Alexa has sold 500M+ devices, which is a mind-boggling user data moat." Yes, recordings of 500 million people saying "set a timer for ten minutes," and "order more paper towels" over and over again, truly a treasure-trove.

[SavageBeast]

My personal favorite is "Alexa! All Hue Lights ON" here - I only trust Siri with important cooking timers.

[dmix]

Mine usually goes:

"alexa lights" (works 50% of the time)

"ALEXA lights"

"ALEXA TURN LIGHTS ON"

I still love Alexa though, or more accurately, voice assistants in the home. It's just brutally out of date speech recognition and answering.

Always been a mystery why they didn't make it any better in the last 5yrs.

I've long wondered what the Alexa team does all day, but I've had friends who worked at Amazon as devs and I'm pretty sure it's "find as many ways to do nothing as possible".

[SavageBeast]

What they did in the last 5 years was deprecate to death the Alexa web interface as well as totally ruin the Alexa mobile app such that there was really no great way to administrate my condo full of Echos.

[alxathrow]

What if I were to tell you that the Echo team spent all their time building not one, not two, but three entirely separate embedded tech stacks, for which all features had to be ported over, that all had to be supported because there's 25+ different devices because people got promoted for shipping 4 different ones every year?

[SavageBeast]

I always wondered (being a developer myself) how a team at a well financed FAANG could fuck this up so badly. It seemed to me as if they were intentionally trying to ruin the product. Changes for no benefit month to month and this month doesn't work like it did last month, etc. Every night all 6 devices get reset to the same broken configuration I just changed yet again that day. What you describe here would do it easily and I'd absolutely believe you. I envisioned there had to be some reason but I'd have never guessed this was it.

[notyourwork]

The mobile app is utterly terrible.

[htrp]

just like Google they fired the entire speech flow teams

[DebtDeflation]

"Alexa, how much time left on my timer?"

"You have no active timers."

"Godd@mn you m..."

[SavageBeast]

YUP - thats my experience as well - consistently too. The ONE thing we all use this kind of limited tech for and the Alexa team couldn't even do that well.

[ghaff]

I don't even really use it for that. I have a kitchen timer on my microwave and another one on the oven. Both are easy to set. I can see if they're running and how much time is left.

[sokoloff]

I'd guess that half our Alexa utterances are for setting timers (the other half being split between listening to music and summoning the family to dinner/other announcements). Having dirty hands or not having to walk over to frob buttons makes the voice-activated timers pretty compelling to me.

[dhosek]

For a while they were pretty much giving away the little Alexa dots. Buy some soap, get a free Alexa. I remember being unable to give them away and I think we ended up just trashing about half a dozen of them (vs the five active Alexa unites my ex-wife has. I personally have none in my home and plan to keep it that way).

[burningChrome]

> truly a treasure trove.

You forgot the part about it solving crimes.

https://broward.us/2023/07/18/amazons-alexa-is-surprise-witn...

[montag]

Imagine how many millions of “shut up!” “F—- you alexa!” Etc.

[hightrix]

At least a few 100 from me.

"Alexa play music"

(having setup Apple Music as default on every device and the Alexa app)

"Ok, playing My Soundtrack on Amazon Music"

"Alexa Stop, Alexa Stop, Alexa Stop, Alexa Stop"

"Alexa play music"

"Ok, playing Apple Music"

"What the f*$#, F^%@ you Alexa"

[potatolicious]

This is the core tension at the heart of Alexa that the author didn't address at all. It's not that Alexa is a bad product or that it wasn't cutting-edge, it's that it contributed very little to Amazon's other lines of businesses to justify the investment.

"Shopping with your voice" never took off despite many attempts. The contribution towards subscription services like Audible and Amazon Music was not substantial enough to warrant the massive R&D investment. The business unit never found any other sources of convincing revenue.

Every other decision is downstream from that unresolved tension.

[ansible]

Huh, interesting.

I've never used our Alexa for shopping. If I said something like "Alexa, buy more filters", even being very clever and looking at my order history, it would still get something wrong. And then I'd need to use another device to actually make the order.

While it seems to work fine on the speech recognition part, in that Alexa understands the words I say, it never seemed good enough to actually navigate a task like ordering the right kind of filter.

I knew there was some behind-the-scenes scripting going on, but I didn't realize just how much...

We mostly use our Alexa for kitchen timers, reminders, and video calls with family. Occasionally for playing music too. No, I don't want to subscribe to Amazon Music Unlimited.

[ryandrake]

> "Shopping with your voice" never took off despite many attempts.

We're seeing this more and more in tech: Company comes out with a feature that few people want. It doesn't gain adoption. They make many attempts to cajole and nudge users to use the feature. Users don't use the feature. They make more buttons and flows trigger the feature. Users ignore them. They start tricking users into using the feature, with dark patterns and misleading buttons. Users deliberately learn and avoid these. Exasperated, they declare "Why, oh why, won't users just use this feature!? They're just uninformed or don't know what's good for them!"

Whatever happened to starting with what the user actually wants and then working backwards from that to the actual feature? More and more, companies are more interested in serving their own metrics than serving their users.

[mason55]

Lots of companies still work like you said. With a company like Amazon, though, you have two things at play.

The first is that it takes a massive amount of dollars to make an impact on revenue. You're just not going to move the needle by selling a new product or something. It's a mature business and to meaningfully increase your revenues you need to alter people's current behavior so they spend more.

But, the second thing, is that if you manage to increase revenue by a percentage point, that is a huge amount of money, and that potential payoff can justify a huge investment. And once you've made that investment, there's a lot of incentive to try to make it work (between sunk cost fallacy and potential payoff).

Lots and lots and lots of companies fail because they build something that doesn't solve a need. It's like the number one thing you learn. This is nothing new. It's just that in the age of hyperscaled tech companies, the payoff for unlocking a new market or changing user behavior is huge, so you end up with lots of attempts to develop some technology and then figure out how to use it to change the world.

[JohnFen]

I actually think this sort of thing is a huge part of SV-style companies are increasingly viewed in a poor light by normal people.

It's hubris. The mindset takes "People don't know what they want. We do." far, far too seriously.

[edmundsauto]

I think it’s much more nuanced. Remember Ford’s “we make cars in everyone’s favorite colors (As long as it’s black)”

When you’re making a product you have to spin up the flywheel with marketing in order to get accurate feedback from customers.

The previous method was to use focus groups to make new products. That was far worse.

Even harder, nowadays the biggest impact comes from platforms instead of products. Multi-sided marketplaces are even more challenging.

It’s not hubris, it’s collective complexity, increasingly sophisticated consumers, and less low hanging fruit.

[JohnFen]

> The previous method was to use focus groups to make new products. That was far worse.

I actually don't think that was worse at all, and focus groups should come back into the equation. Not as the only measure, of course, but they were never the only measure.

[edmundsauto]

The problem with focus groups is 1) people say they want different things than they actually do, and 2) it's rarely representative, you'd need thousands of people. Then, once scaled, you lose details because it has to be more survey-like. Add in the leadership team's "vision" and you have a recipe for only making products for e.g. white men and ignoring the black woman haircare market.

It all has a place - but actual real data is probably the best way to figure out product market fit in my experience.

[denimnerd42]

they want you to shop with your voice because there is a lot of friction if you then decide that's not what you really wanted. most people if they mistakenly order something with alexa will just let it be delivered, not cancel it.

same with using a mobile app to shop. you have less ability to cross shop quickly because the interface is inherently slower than a mouse and keyboard plus the OS multi tasking features are horrible. plus they get a lot more information about you with their app.

so it's not always that they think the feature is better for you, it may just be that it's better for them.

[malfist]

I used Alexa for audible a few times and it was a nightmare. It wouldn't start where I stopped listening on my phone, and then when I stopped listening with the alexa it wouldn't record the correct timeslot back to my phone. So I either had to _only_ listen with alexa, or listen with everything else on my phone.

Guess which I picked?

[ssl-3]

Shopping for household goods on Amazon is a minefield to begin with. Prices vary wildly from day to day, even on identical (same ASIN) products. And descriptions tend to be vague (is it Mediterranean oregano, or is it Mexican oregano? They're not the same plant, but it doesn't fucking say!). Per-unit pricing is often broken (is it 24 units of single cans, or is it 4 units of 6 cans each?).

Even when sitting in front of a real computer, it often takes fair amount of effort to find a product that represents the kind of value at the moment that I'm interested in.

Comparative shopping with this mess on the back end doesn't work with the current state of Alexa. There's details that are important to me, as a consumer, that can't be boiled down to a price and an 8-word summary.

If the back-end data weren't broken, buying with Alexa could be made to work if it could get a grasp (using ML or some other buzzword) of how a buyer's proclivities tended to be shaped. For instance, some people want the best per-volume price, and some others want the highest quality at any expense, with a huge range in between. I myself don't have a ton of room for bulk buying, so I often aim for a medium volume of moderate-high quality, tempered by a price that is low today.

But, again: The back-end data is broken, and Alexa is too stupid to make what I think are good decisions. When I can't trust the talking computer on my countertop to make good decisions for me, and if my hands are already full, I don't have time to have a drawn-out conversation with a bot, so I won't ever actually buy stuff that way.

It's not functionally better than Amazon's abortive Dash Buttons[0] from 8-ish years ago, which were also untrustworthy for many of the same (or related) reasons.

---

But if I'm cooking in the kitchen and I notice that I'm low on oregano, I do have time to say "Alexa, add oregano to my cart." And I'll also invariably make time to interrupt its misguided response with a quick "Alexa, shut the fuck up" once it starts prattling on about the useless summary from the bad back-end data (GIGO), so I can get back to doing what I'm doing.

This is important to mention because if I weren't already busy with my hands, I wouldn't bother with using Alexa at all for this task.

Eventually, I'll find myself in front of a real computer again and I'll go through and true up the things I've used Alexa to put in my cart, so they match my actual expectations, and actually buy some things. And while this is useful to me, it's obviously pretty far removed from the target goal of the system.

And it can't ever get better until they fix their data.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Dash

[snarf21]

100% agree. I don't want to converse with Alexa. I think the miss was not thinking about it as a media delivery platform with some utility. I use Alexa in the Kitchen and Bathroom when I'm doing other things. Hands free timers while cooking is great. But mostly it is listening to music. But they should have tried to be a #1 podcast source from day 1. I'd also like local weather and news from a local source. They could have made that another focus. Audio books and a lot of the other Amazon controlled content translates well to an Alexa. I think they focused too much on the smart house side and not enough on hands-free content consumption.

[PaulHoule]

Amazon could be at the late Sears and Robucks phase already where it cares more about people subscribing to Prime than it does selling things.

It’s painful to see them give up a good brand just as the moment when a change in technology could have given them wheels…

[pbhjpbhj]

For sales they gave up a good brand, what, 8? years ago when they stopped caring if what they were selling was even a real product and started taking part in the sale of products they know to be fake and/or rip-offs.

They cornered so many markets and, surprise, used that position to let every go to shit for a profit. Still at least Bezos got to wave his wang at the World by going to space.

[SavageBeast]

AMZN execs are watching AAPL stock go bonkers today on yesterdays AI announcement. APPLE IS DOING AI AND WE ALL NEED NEW PHONES TO USE IT!

I expect a similar thing to happen when AMZN announces some AI consumer product. Never mind they were in a Prime (ahahah - get it - "PRIME") position to be the first mover here.

An opportunity good and truly squandered.

[dylan604]

Is Alexa really that primed to be useful? For home devices, maybe. For mobile? The Goog's seems like it would be better primed with its Android devices.

What I saw from Apple this week shows me that they've been much more focused on making the assistant useful for anything/everything someone could do on their devices. I have not see that kind of focus from anyone else.

[HaZeust]

Speculating that the brand behind AWS might be in the late Sears phase is hilarious to me.

[PaulHoule]

I'll argue that business is a lot faster paced in the "age of enshitification" than it was in the past so that today a company can decline as much in 4 years as would have previously taken 40.

4 years ago I bought something from AMZN roughly weekly, today I buy something from them every few months. They'll put up a banner that says "You paid $30 for shipping in the last year" and I'm like, yeah, you want a lot more than that for Prime. They've got the data to show that, at best, I watched about $30 worth of Blu-Ray discs worth of content on Prime Video per year. Add it up and Prime makes no sense for me.

The fact that they have a highly profitable AWS business makes it worse instead of better since they can maintain the perception of normality, even growth, and not have to pay attention to the rest of their business.

[dylan604]

Their forced insertion of ads into their streaming content was it for me. There are so many shows that do not say ad supported and available with Prime, yet as soon as I'm watching something that shows me an unexpected ad break, I stop it right there. I doubt there's anyone looking that the specific metric of how many shows stopped being viewed at the ad break, but I can't imagine I'm the only one.

[epolanski]

I always suspected YouTube pays attention at ad breakes because every time they would dare starting a video with 40/50 seconds of unskippable ads (happens on the tv app only, they never dared on desktop/laptop) I just exit the video, reopen it (or another), and I'm served for a goos hour 15 to 25 second ad max.

And yes, I went for Premium which I find outrageously expensive.

[geodel]

Agree. I feel they are getting high on their own supply.

Management bullshit that is usually fed to 2nd tier companies by giving examples of Amazon on how the best in industry operates is now actually believed by Amazon itself.

[vishnugupta]

Absolutely! I’ve commented about it a few times on HN[1] as I was at Amazon at the beginning of Alexa of investment.

As with other projects Amazon’s plan seems to have been get big fast and figure out monetizing later. I’m sure ZIRP played some role in it and if not for rate hikes they might have kept it going for few more years.

But their aim from day 1 was to get millions of devices into customers home and then use that to boost e-commerce sales. When the second part didn’t materialize the initiative suddenly became a white elephant as it costs non trivial server capacity to keep the backend infrastructure running.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40009295

[planetafro]

I feel like you are correct while thinking Apple's stance is the smarter play. My family ditched the entire Amazon ecosystem because Alexa was so utterly useless. Keeping people generally happy and entertained creates a positive mentality on the entire company as a whole. Let me tell you, having the kids on board is huge and prob a missed opportunity. You could literally be training kids to be little Amazon shills if this was done right. Mine loved talking to Alexa and then she got less and less intelligent and we swapped to Google's products -- same story there. Now it is pretty much a weather-bot and that is all.

[blackeyeblitzar]

> it was to sell more stuff on Amazon

Is that actually true? I cannot imagine that they are even marginally successful at that. In fact, I can’t identify what exactly Alexa succeeded at, beyond being a voice activated kitchen timer.

> that cannot be the metric that leadership actually cared about

I think the metric was promotions for Alexa employees, sort of like a lot of projects at Google.

[ssl-3]

It's a networked, voice-activated kitchen kitchen timer, but it's a shitty one.

Suppose I put a roast in the oven and retire to my office to do something completely unrelated to cooking, where I cannot hear what happens in the kitchen.

One would think that I could set a timer in the kitchen and have it notify me wherever I am -- in the office, in the living room, on my pocket computer, on my desktop PC, or maybe even all of these things.

"Alexa, set a timer for two hours and notify me everywhere" seems like a perfectly cromulent thing to do.

But it isn't that way. Timers follow Vegas rules: Timers that that start in the kitchen stay in the kitchen -- they cannot be heard anywhere else.

It's not superior in any functional way to the old dumb digital timer on my oven, which has a VFD and a rotary encoder to set a timer.

(Which, by the way, has really marvelous ramps and responsiveness for that encoder -- it's silly-fast and efficient to give that knob a twist and dial in exactly what I want for a timer. Adjusting the clock for DST or whatever is equally fast and straightforward.

Except, fucking perplexingly: Alexa can notify me in the office when my oven timer beeps in the kitchen. This works fine.

All that is clear is that there is nobody steering this fucking ship.)

[bombela]

> Which, by the way, has really marvelous ramps and responsiveness for that encoder -- it's silly-fast and efficient to give that knob a twist and dial in exactly what I want for a timer.

Omg I am so jealous. All the appliances I use at home or family have horrendous UIs.

And I am really trying hard to find appliances with passable UIs. It's impossible those days.

And for the few that have a rotary encoder, they are barely usable, and used for anything but selecting the time.

I have contacted companies and offered to write the code for free to fix theirs shitty knobs. But they all refused or didn't bother replying.

Anyways I am off topic.

[ssl-3]

It's old -- I'd guess from the mid 80s. Branded Kenmore and made by Frigidaire/Electrolux. It was free. The controls themselves were basic electromechanical things -- the clock/timer doesn't do anything but display time/timer and beep.

When I first got it, I assumed it was driven by AC as many clock ICs once were back in those simpler times.

But then I discovered a small low voltage DC power supply when I was in there installing a PID controller for the oven, so it may actually have something resembling software. Maybe.

And yeah, unresponsive physical controls are a pox. I'm not sure what method you used, but perhaps contacting the companies that design and build the boards might be better than contacting the companies that buy the boards and install them.

[zitterbewegung]

Alexa had a whole platform push giving away clothing if you made an app ( I have a nice hoodie from it) The thing they lacked was a way to get payments done through it. This is similar to Vine at Twitter where the core problem was monetization.

[brevitea]

I am literally laughing out loud, because Amazon had decided to fire majority of the Amazon Pay team, which is why there was no longer a clear way to handle payments.

[leros]

I turned off every ad setting they had and it would often end an answer with "by the way, did you know..." and then some Amazon promotion. I asked if it's raining, you don't need to tell me about an increase in Amazon Photo storage sizes. Especially given that it takes longer than answering my original question.

I got frustrated with that and tossed all my Alexas.