Nice numbers but don't those Alexa enabled device bring in revenue offsetting the cost and limiting the loss? Or doesn't anyone have an Amazon premium account or buy anything with Alexa on Amazon?
One internal document described the business model by saying, "We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices."
That plan never really materialized, though. It's not like Alexa plays ad breaks after you use it, so the hope was that people would buy things on Amazon via their voice. Not many people want to trust an AI with spending their money or buying an item without seeing a picture or reading reviews. The report says that by year four of the Alexa experiment, "Alexa was getting a billion interactions a week, but most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather." Those questions aren't monetizable.
I dunno, it's the sort of thing that would be fit for a robocop-like dystopia just a couple decades ago but is seemingly... "normal" now.
If Amazon wants to datamine the dickens out of that to sell me more socks and USB cables, I really don't care.
Boggles the mind.