[nextworddev]

Hmm, I'm an early Alexa PM (2016) that left Alexa before the OP joined it (2019).

Alexa's main failure was mainly that the tech wasn't ready - it was basically a ASR + NLU + rule engine. If we had 2023 LLM tech, then we may have "won" the Assistants market.

Yes, organizational bloat and politics was a problem but OP was hired as a result of the mass hiring spree, so he was a beneficiary of that.

[dbish]

Also ex-Alexa in the early years, while that would have helped, I really don't think it was just the tech stage. As we grew it was very hard to work on the core tech at all since we had a bunch of time spent on organization issues and working with people who 1) didn't get how ML worked or pay attention to how the tech is changing (most of the "domain" teams) and wanted to just ship new integrations or demo features and 2) never found a monetization channel which would have allowed for investment into deeper tech (and less senior leadership/exec churn).

Though I also very much agree with the other point of OP that privacy paranoia also blocked development. The privacy team seemed like they would have been most happy if we couldn't ship.

[nextworddev]

the privacy thing became a real roadblock due to GDPR emerging after the whole Facebook scandal.

can confirm that several of my launches got delayed to bolt on GDPR

[mips_avatar]

I wouldn't really call OP a beneficiary of it. As much as I like drawing a paycheck I don't want to work for an organization that's set up to keep me from succeeding. I imagine OP feels that way too.

[krisroadruck]

Honestly I think the only reason you guys shipped as many units as you did was blocking other voice assistants from interacting with Audible. I've had an Alexa/Echo since the early beta and it has literally always been worse than other options like google home. It's gotten progressively worse over time as well. Not just comparatively but vs it's own experience several years ago.

[nextworddev]

Yep, can confirm that it was better in 2017 than 2021.

Mainly because when the org chart grows, more "rules" are added to the rules engine, where each rule is managed by another service... which all adds to end to end user perceived latency, etc... that's why rule engines don't work.

[ratg13]

I have a first gen echo and generally it has gotten better over time.

In the early years I couldn’t control the Phillips hue lights in my home, and then one year suddenly I could thanks to updates.

Most companies would have abandoned hardware this old.

[lolinder]

The hardware is just a microphone, a speaker, a tiny computer, and a WiFi chip. It's easy to keep providing updates for old hardware when all the brains live in the cloud.

[nextworddev]

home automation is what makes the product stick in many cases

[pbhjpbhj]

They don't seem to have modded Alexa to keep pace with accessibility of the pubic to LLMs though? Presumably they'd have just let that market lead slide in the same way.

[nextworddev]

They are actually planning to do that - it's just a software update - though they are doing that with Amazon Titan model, which might be kind of behind..

Also they are trying to sell as a subscription which is interesting since Siri is free.