Someone has to say it: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech
- Reference: 1669195809
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/11/23/voice_assistants_fail/
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But behind the scenes, the industry is also seeing the demise of another popular craze Amazon was trying so hard to make a thing. With its voice-interface device, Alexa, the global ecommerce and tech behemoth in 2014 set in train a fashion for speech interfaces in the home, which had keen households around the world demanding their AI house guests to tell them jokes and answer trivia questions.
But why? That's just what Amazon may be wondering. [1]According to reports , its Worldwide Digital unit, which Echo smart speakers and Alexa voice technology fall under, hit an operating loss of over $3 billion. Business Insider also claimed the vast majority of the losses were tied to Amazon's Alexa and other devices.
[2]
When asked by The Register , Amazon did not respond to this. Instead, in a statement, Amazon's senior vice president for devices and services David Limp said: "We are as committed as ever to Echo and Alexa, and will continue to invest heavily in them."
Just $10 to create an AI chatbot of a dead loved one [3]READ MORE
Eight years after [4]its launch this is not how it was supposed to be. Alexa, along with voice-interface cousins Google Assistant and [5]Microsoft's Cortana , were supposed to usher in a new era of at-home interaction with information services and retail sales.
Some estimates said the market for so-called "conversational commerce" would be worth [6]$35 billion by 2020 .
[7]
[8]
The argument went something like this. Offering up a combination of information and shopping, voice assistants would be able to give households guidance and advice – weather, travel, recipes etcetera – while in the background Amazon or third-party retailers use some clever analytics to serve up the most likely purchases in a given period.
[9]Amazon reportedly considers laying off 10k employees
[10]Amazon opens MASSIVE AI speech dataset so Alexa can speak your language
[11]Alexa Live 2022: Stretching possibilities for voice AI at home
[12]Amazon can't channel the dead, but its deepfake voices take a close second
In this slightly creepy vision of surveillance capitalism, we imagine what someone who commutes 20 miles to work on a rainy Wednesday might be wanting to cook for their school-aged kids – one of whom is lactose intolerant – when they get home. The sheer convenience and usefulness were supposed to make the services extremely sticky. Given Amazon also provides video streaming services, it was part of a so-called "digital entanglement" designed to guarantee customer loyalty.
What went wrong? While the tech firms behind these services did sign a number of partnerships with retailers, and [13]offer access to their platforms via "skills" to allow retailers take orders by voice, customers don't seem so keen.
From 2018 onward there was a [14]flurry of [15]stories suggesting voice shopping was not all that it was cracked up to be and that consumers were just as happy to sit down and click away until they had the basket they wanted.
[16]
While timers, music, and weather forecasts might be good for users, they are hardly high earners for the platform providers. At the same time, the first page of Amazon "skills" downloads include four apps for making fart noises.
Maybe it's an idea whose time is yet to come. But for now the dream of a cross-platform voice-assisted future for commerce and digital services seems set to fall silent. ®
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[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-alexa-job-layoffs-rise-and-fall-2022-11
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Y339TWa81UEKfqArBSXKZgAAABE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/15/would_you_pay_10_to/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2014/11/07/amazon_echo_speaker/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/01/microsofts_cortana_smartphone/
[6] https://www.capgemini.com/no-no/service/conversational-commerce/
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y339TWa81UEKfqArBSXKZgAAABE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y339TWa81UEKfqArBSXKZgAAABE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/14/amazon_job_cuts/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/20/amazon_ai_speech/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/21/alexa_live_2022/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/amazon_alexa_voice_mimicry/
[13] https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/gb/groceries/get-ideas/features/our-brand-features/sainsburys-alexa-skill
[14] https://www.retaildive.com/news/the-information-only-2-of-alexa-users-reportedly-purchase-off-the-devices/529608/
[15] https://www.wired.com/story/why-is-voice-shopping-bad/
[16] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y339TWa81UEKfqArBSXKZgAAABE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Certainly for the visually impaired and other disabled people these are brilliant devices and have proved to be life changing, where they are doing things to assist such as smart home equipment
For the rest of us, we’ll I can’t see the appeal to be honest, unless you get an ego trip for asking the lights to turn on without getting out the chair.
I do remember there being an Amazon advert where the protagonist was in a wheel chair, and used Alexa to do more or less everything for him.
I've since got an Alexa to operate some smart plugs in the house, and I often have to repeat myself two or three times because even though Alexa says "OK" to switching my TV on, the TV is never switched on.
considering how much utter crap that appears whenever you search for anything on amazon that is impossible to filter out, why would anyone try to buy anything with an inaccurate voice system.
you could end up with anything arriving. nevermind the crazy price differentials on exactly the same item all over the place.
I only ever use Amazon for stuff that doesn't appear in normal shops (phone case for unusual phone).
The great turn off
Managed to persuade the wife to turn hers off when she's not listening to music by just talking out loud when I was alone in the house.
She started getting all these strange adverts online completely unrelated to anything that interests her.
When she asked why that would be I started talking carburettors, after the very strange looks and a couple of days she stormed into the kitchen and pulled its plug.
Re: The great turn off
Next time you're in someone else's house where they have one of these, start discussing sex toys.
Re: The great turn off
Bukkake and Bondage too
Re: The great turn off
Amazon persuaded us to turn ours off, by "improving" their free (with Prime) music service.
It used to happily play whatever you asked of it as long as it was in Amazon's free library.
A month or so ago they changed that. Now if you ask for a track or artist, it will play a random playlist of rubbish that you didn't want or ask for, possibly with the one you did want buried somewhere in the mix.
A bit like Heart FM, but without the creepy Big Brother surveillance.
Re: The great turn off
I found something similar with an free / gratis all-music internet station I listen to.
For years I have played it either through its bespoke app or its web interface. After getting an Echo, I asked it to play the same station and just got a long spiel (one reason I dislike speech based interfaces is that they are so slow) that can be summarised as "no".
So I simply went back to getting the same content through the device I had used before and playing it over the Echo's BT link.
We recieved one as a gift from a family member
It was an awkward situation as we told him "thanks but no thanks, can he take it back for a refund?"
Obligatory
https://xkcd.com/1807/
Re: Obligatory
I shouldn't have had to scroll down so far for this!
Alexa: why does nobody like you?
> When asked by The Register, ... David Limp said: "We are as committed as ever to Echo and Alexa"
Presumably that "commitment" was (and still is) based on the amount of profit that Alexa brings in. So nothing there has changed. As ever.
Nothing, except that Alexa is a massive loss-maker. Hence we can reasonably expect that the "commitment" will follow the P&L and that within a short space of time the service will either be sold off, introduce advertisements alongside every vocal output from the device, or simply be shut down.
Does this factor in the extra sales made on smart devices that people only purchased because they could be controlled via their alexa?
I'm not surprised. These things are at best tools.
I do make some use of Siri (it is handy for turning things on and off if you don't have a hand free, and can be used to query things like apps (which is what I need it for). It doesn't have many of the bells and whistles of Alexa or Google (Cortana is pretty much gone anyway), and isn't trying to be a friend, but I don't need it to be.
I did try Alexa, Google and Cortana, but, TBH, once I got over the novelty of being able to get a device to sing or tell jokes, and acting like a friend, I found I didn't really use them.
That said, I am not disabled, so am able to use physical controls, whether on my devices or on remote controls. I can understand that a voice interface is handy for those who can't.
The downside to the likes of Alexa, Google and Cortana is the monitoring. The device needs to send recordings to Amazon, Google or Microsoft for processing. It's listening constantly, at least for it's activation phrase. While it doesn't necessarily need to send data back to base to process this, it may send that data anyway. You only have the assurance of Amazon, Google or Microsoft that they are handling the data securely, and not using it for nefarious purposes. Note: The same does apply to Apple for Siri, but you can require Siri to only react to a physical button press, and I have.
As far as shopping goes, the only use case I can think of is helping blind people shop. Maybe it could work better than using a website with a screen reader? I'm not sure.
For anyone who is able to look at a web page, that surely is always going to be quicker / better.