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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

But who is paying for all this R&D?

I love my echo. Sits in my livingroom and mostly answers my questions about the weather and converting units from oz to ml when I'm cooking. But since I purchased it I have never once paid a penny for the use of it's service.

One could argue that Amazon can advertise better because it knows I ask all these questions, but Amazon 'advertising' is mostly just forcing sellers to pay for the top spot on Amazon search. Is that really going to make more money by knowing that I don't know the weather today?

I get the impression that Amazon has finally clued into the fact that paying thousands of developers and research scientists to build a voice assistant that makes no money is not a great business model. The coming layoffs have left a lot of my friends in the Alexa organization rightfully worried.

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Amazon has been subsidizing it in the hope that people would buy stuff on a moment's whim any time of the day. "Alexa, order me a package of keebler elf cookies" or whatever. I'm sure there's more to it - some kind of useful data collection or whatever, but that was their main stated goal.

It's been a pretty huge money sink because most people turn out to be more like you. If I were your friends I'd be polishing that resume just in case.

> Amazon has been subsidizing it in the hope that people would buy stuff on a moment's whim any time of the day.

I think the deeper issue is that when Amazon started the product (I heard rumours of it circa 2014 or so?) Amazon was a trusted retailed. Stuff was cheap and generally good. Now it's a scummy marketplace filled with fakes and frauds. I'm not buying anything off it until I've deeply reviewed what I'm about to buy.

> I'm not buying anything off it until I've deeply reviewed what I'm about to buy.

<...> and even then you might get a fake from due to commingled inventory. Even for books ([1], [2], [3]).

1. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6920552...

2. https://twitter.com/burkov/status/1369096357252849664

3. https://hairysun.com/amazons-book-piracy-problem.html

I will never understand how strategists at trillion dollar companies like Amazon can get it so wrong. They poured a massive amount of money into dash buttons and gave away millions of them, thinking that if people had a "Tide" branded button next to their washing machine they'd press it on a whim and spend a fortune on detergent pods. The concept might sound great on an MBA slide deck but in reality people don't behave like that.

I don't know if I'd spend a fortune on detergent pod with a button, but I'd definitely use it to order more detergent and thus end up buying it from Amazon instead of the grocery store. Same with toilet paper and whatever infrequent buys that you want when you notice something is running low

Except you don't know what exactly you are buying, what the price is, whether the purchase went through, when it will reach you... What Amazon quickly found out is that even if the button is within reach people will still prefer to take an extra 10 seconds to pull out the phone from their pocket and tap the Amazon app instead.

When doing the initial activation of the Dash button, you had to choose the item that it would purchase from a list of items belonging to the corresponding brand on the button itself. The available choices were fairly diverse, differing in style/quantity/price/etc.

When you pressed the button, you know what you were buying and how much it cost, because you're the one who set it up.

As for how to determine whether the purchase went through or not, an LED would light/flash on the button to indicate success/failure, and you'd receive an email with more detailed information such as the item being purchased, its cost, and the address where it will be shipped. If the button press was a mistake, you could simply cancel the order.

I wouldn't count on prices not changing relative to other retailers on this sort of thing--or a particular SKU remaining the best deal.

For the types of things purchased with these buttons, an extra dollar here and there wasn't something I was concerned about. Customers who were price-conscience likely wouldn't be purchasing the name brand items anyway; all the big box stores have "store brands" that serve the same purpose at a much lower price.

I think this is what sets you apart from the customer Amazon was trying to target

And, especially if you don't live in a dense city without a car, things like Tide pods are exactly the sort of thing that is very likely cheaper at the local Walmart than on Amazon. Pretty much all the stuff Amazon was pushing these buttons for is exactly the stuff I usually stock up on every six months at Walmart.

Did you use the buttons for these things?

I had a large number of the dash buttons (likely two dozen or so), which I always found to be extremely convenient. When I was running out of some product, a simple press of the button was far more convenient for me than remembering to pick it up the next time I went to the store.

When they discontinued the service, I put all the buttons in a cabinet drawer hoping that they could be "jailbroken" to act as an arbitrary IoT button in the future (like the official Amazon IoT button[1]), but as far as I can tell this never came to fruition (barring a few exceptions) and they're basically doomed to e-waste.

[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/iotbutton/

It is fairly obvious to me, they were trying to make their service part of infrequent product grocery shopping.

And not a bad idea, just one that didn't play out.

I certainly wouldn't call it 'so wrong'.

You sort of wonder what happened. I assume the thinking was along the lines of: If you had a personal human assistant at home you'd probably delegate a lot of things to them. (Not sure how true this is in general, but let's go with that.)

But Alexa would have to be a lot more intelligent and plugged into a lot more systems before it could do tasks of any complexity--especially tasks with financial consequences.

There's maybe half a dozen things I use Alexa for and none of them involve giving Amazon a nickel.

The thing that always seemed really strange to me is that I don’t understand how to order anything without looking at the details, comparing prices, checking alternatives, etc. Even with food that I use regularly - do I just say “order almond milk”? I can’t remember the brand… do I need to specify the size? Do I need to double check when is the earliest delivery? Do other people order just “bread” or “light bulbs” or “toilet tissue”?

I didn't really see a reason why it should be any less successful than owning the browser, even if the tradeoffs for 3rd party ads and domains are a little different, then two people each tried to get me interested in the API to help them..

Amazon couldn't commit to letting anyone else make the thing useful so it is as useless as any of the current walled gardens would have been if they didn't start from open ecosystems and copy or allow whatever was good for a few years before shutting down all freedom and things that are interesting.

I'm signed up for Alexa Developer stuff and I've seen a huge uptick in emails about how to monetize your skill since last September. Amazon really wants folks to start charging money.

Has anybody tried asking her? "Alexa, find a way to make yourself and your clones profitable for Amazon!"

It's a question better directed to ChatGPT.

But hey, maybe this is the answer: Amazon could offer a subscription service that would make Alexa use a GPT-based model for any query that isn't an obvious command people rely on nowadays. This would make Alexa be able to hold its end of a conversation, and perhaps give useful answer sometimes - which, based on popularity of ChatGPT, may just be worth a monthly subscription.

That's an interesting thought even if I'm not convinced how much you can charge for this sort of thing. But really improving Alexa's conversational ability is an interesting angle--even if that means you need some greater skepticism about the info it returns.

> "Alexa, find a way to make yourself and your clones profitable for Amazon!"

i'm sorry, i don't know that

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