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Here are some good use cases that I've found for mine.
When I'm busy cooking, it's really clutch to be able to say "Alexa, set timer for x minutes" while I keep working on my cooking.
Similarly to the above, when I'm planning a shopping trip it is useful to be able to verbally add things to my shopping list as I go through the kitchen identifying what things I need. And when I'm at the store, I can use the app on my phone to pull up the things I need.
Simplifying things for my wife on occasion. She is terrible at remembering the details of how our AV receiver is hooked up, and she used to always ask me "hey which input is X on?". But now (with the assistance of a Harmony hub to be fair), she can go "Alexa, turn on the PS4" and all the devices get turned on and to the correct inputs.
Triggering home automation routines. For example, when I say "Alexa, good night" I have a routine which turns off every room light, turns the TV and related devices off, locks the front door, and turns the hall lights to a dim nightlight setting. Sure I could do a button to kick off the routine, but it's a lot nicer to be able to issue voice commands and not have to have a physical thing to trigger for each routine I want to setup.
Overall, I would say that it is legitimately useful to have in our household. Granted I'm looking to jump ship, but that's because Amazon has been adding user hostile behavior and not because the core use cases aren't good for me. I would say that voice assistants are kind of like In-N-Out Burger: ridiculously overhyped by the hardcore fans, but still legitimately good as long as you don't let those hardcore fans set your expectations too high.
What user hostile behaviour are they doing that is making you jump ship?
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the "good night moon, good night amazonĀ® co ltd." thing is where it starts to look risky to me, especially if kids learn from it. Feels much safer to be able to say "computer: engage evening mode" in the famous "earl gray, hot" voice of command.
Once you start exchanging pleasantries with the abominable intelligence, it's all over. I know an old widow who started to chat with her Alexa thing during lockdowns, and building that sort of exploitable customer "relationship" with vulnerable lonely people is what some Amazon marketing ghoul drools over.
This is my issue as well. I want them to respond with an R2-D2 beep, not a "sure! One sec, let me find that for you! :) "
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I actually was very pleased that the Amazon engineers let you set the device so that it responds to "computer". I had great fun for a couple of days going "computer, do this. Computer, do that." Unfortunately, it kept trying to respond when I was watching Star Trek, and it got annoying so I turned it back to the default of "Alexa". I want to be able to watch my TNG in peace, and all that.
That's hilarious, no wonder they always try to make the activation word something weird by default (although "Alexa" must have caused some embarrassing issues in strip clubs)
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All those algorithms and they don't have voice print registration? Seems like it should be a simple update.
They do have some mechanism whereby the device will ignore the TV, but at the time it didn't work for not picking up Star Trek. Not sure if they have improved it since, though. It was 4 years ago, so it's certainly possible.
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I don't use any of these home assistants, but I think the examples you gave are precisely why it's not profitable.
Amazon wanted/wants to use it to make money, ideally by you ordering and buying things off Amazon. Householders wanted to use it for things like "set the timer" or "what's the weather like" or "play that song". Amazon gets nothing out of you using it as an oven timer, and for shopping lists they want you to order what you want off Amazon Fresh or something, not bop down to your local grocery store.
They sold it as that kind of personal assistant, but the idea was to be a money-maker steering orders and purchases Amazon's way. That people used it for the unprofitable functions that Amazon marketed as the ostensible purpose is just icing on the cake.
I believe that requires a subscription to Amazon music. I think selling subscription services was their big plan.
It does, and it will endlessly remind you of it. At a AirBNB place we stayed at, they had Alexa, and you could sort of trick (play channel X, or play a different song, which it then tells you it can't, and plays something close). Super-obnoxious, further turned me off assistants.
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The weird thing is that Amazon's E-commerce arm isn't even that valuable. The bulk (maybe 80%) of Amazon's market value comes from AWS. E-commerce is now being recognized as a not-particularly-good business, and Amazon loses money on it.
So spending billions on a device that encourages buying stuff on Amazon wouldn't be a great idea even if it worked, which it doesn't.
Source? According to Amazon's most recent annual report to the SEC (Ctrl-F "Note 10"), operating income was 18.5 billion $ (74.5 %) for AWS, 7.2 billion $ (29.2 %) for e-commerce in North America, and ā0.9 billion $ (ā3.7 %) for e-commerce outside North America. At least on the basis of those numbers, e-commerce does not look unprofitable.
Going off memory, last quarter they were negative profitability on non-AWS. Cash flow numbers are going to look even worse because of that ungodly capex.
Edit. Found the slides from their latest earnings. North American e-commerce segment had losses in each of the last 4 quarters, with the most recent quarter being -412 million. International might as well get axed. Earnings are hugely negative and getting worse. Last quarter was -2466 million. Maybe you are looking at older pandemic-era data?
In the document that I linked above, which is an official filing with the SEC, e-commerce in North America is shown as profitable (positive operating income: net sales minus operating expenses) in 2021, 2020, and 2019.
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Oh I have no doubt of that. Especially because of the user-hostile behavior I mentioned. These days it's hard to use the damn thing without it advertising some "feature" to you, in the form of saying "by the way, did you know you can blah blah blah?". And if that wasn't bad enough, they straight up put ads in the shopping list section of the app trying to get you to buy their food deals. It's pretty clear that they are trying desperately to get the sort of usage you state.
I admit to some enjoyment that the marketing bods at Amazon thought they were being stealthy and getting one over on people: "We'll sell it to them as a handy aide-memoire and chat buddy, and once they're dependent on it as their computer friend, they'll move right along to buying stuff from us as is the plan!"
People just used it as the aide-memoire and didn't turn over their bank accounts to Amazon. I like that.
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This seems like an unavoidable consequence of the difficulty in making an unintelligent auditory interface into a discoverable interface. I glance up at my desktop right now and I can see a couple application menu buttons, one for an OS menu, a half dozen icons for various utilities, a half dozen launcher icons for common applications or searchs or such, a virtual desktop panel with a few other applications visible ... and none of that was obtrusive in the slightest. My eyes can glaze over the parts I don't need a thousand times without bothering me, but then if I actually need something I don't have to have an exact invocation memorized, I can open up a menu and skim down to look for it.
How do you do that with a voice assistant right now? If it was practically passing a Turing test then I could describe vague needs or it could anticipate needs accurately, but with modern not-quite-there-yet AI what's it supposed to do? My ears can't glaze over "did you know you can" the way my eyes can glaze over a menu item or an icon, but I need some sort of indication of a feature or I just don't know the feature exists.
(it also would be nice if it actually had the same basic features as my computers, at the same price; now that's a problem they should have been able to avoid...)
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