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A website that makes 100+ requests of which 30 get blocked warns me about ads. This is hilarious.

The difference is that Gizmodo is "upfront" about it.

For amazon to say, "Use _____ to remove that stain," and allow my company to put in a $0.35 per request bid to fill it in with "Jeremy's Awesome Cleaning Sauce," seems inherently more wrong.

I dunno, could be some value in the long tail there. Discoverability is the main problem with voice interfaces (aka the world's worst-documented CLI). Third-party skills are already the backbone of Alexa's value, but you have to discover and activate individual skills manually. Amazon needs to get better at general queries, which is hard.

It could be useful to allow people bid on specific kinds of general queries. "You can use our cleaning product for that" is a better answer than "Sorry, I don't know."

There's also some signalling here. It shows that someone is willing to bet money that they have what I want. This is similar to search engine ads.

Like with search engine ads, transparency & privacy are really important. I want to know when I'm receiving sponsored content. I want to know what information was used to decide to show me that content. Duck Duck Go gets this right. Podcasts that play special background music during ad breaks get this right.

Maybe Alexa needs a separate voice or tone for responses with sponsored content.

Is it? If it identifies itself as an advertisement, I see no distinction.

But according to the article, it doesn't. In the example of buying toothpaste, Alexa just says "I can search for a brand, like Colgate". It doesn't indicate whether Colgate paid for that placement.

I agree, if clearly identified as an ad, it isn't as terrible, but would still be annoying.

When I ask for, what I expect to be, a data-driven opinion about toothpaste from a device that is effectively my oven timer, I expect it to be honest!

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