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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 −0.9 billion $ (−3.7 %) 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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