Amazon is releasing a new backend for its Alexa home assistant in October, to be called “Remarkable!” This will run on Anthropic’s Claude LLM chatbot. The new Alexa service will only cost you $5 to…
The new Alexa service will only cost you $5 to $10 a month — and not the present price of $0.
it’s also fucking remarkable how doomed this is. did they talk to none of the people responsible for frog boiling over at Prime Video? come on, we all know the steps:
you start your janky, subpar service at $0, as a value add to an existing Amazon product. this starts you with a massive userbase right off the bat.
you then implement a lock-in mechanism. for a streaming service that’s exclusives; for a voice assistant, that’s probably API integrations designed under an exclusivity contract
now that switching off of your service carries consequences and the lock-in mechanism has given it an aura of prestige (even though it’s probably still janky as fuck), increase its price to $1-2 a month to see how much of your userbase is pliant and willing to accept the introduction of a subscription mechanism. do what it takes to make the idea of a subscription tolerable; segregate your userbase into paid (which get exclusives) and free (which get ads) tiers if you need to.
now that your userbase has been primed (heh) to accept the idea of paying for a previously complementary service, boil the fuck out of that frog. increase subscription fees regularly. introduce ads even for paid tiers. run constant experiments to see how and where you can introduce ads relative to the amount you’re charging before subscriber numbers drop; use that to make the service just annoying and expensive enough that you’re still making a massive profit even after shedding what I’m very certain Amazon considers the dead weight of bad consumers.
the product is now in its final form under capitalism: some horseshit that’s functionally and economically indistinguishable from paying a cable company far too much for a premium TV channel, but with even more ads and customer data exfiltration enabled by the underlying technology. for some shit like Alexa, the value for the customer is even worse — the platform does so little other than push ads and steal data.
but amazon’s not doing the above obvious shit they always do in this case, and I think I know why: unlike streaming, people fucking hate voice assistants, so this $5-$10 fee might just be a desperate strategy to get true believers paying (or they’re fine with killing Alexa by making the subscription version mandatory)
I wonder what the Alexa backend costs relative to user base and data value. Seems like they aren’t likely to get much more useful information than they already get from other sources, and even ignoring the forest-burning hell that is LLMs earlier voice recognition technology wasn’t free in terms of compute.
I think I recall reading something a while back that said the original plan was to make alexa a kind of platform, like a thing that vendors could deliver apps for, but that it completely fell on its arse for some reason (can’t remember now if it was cost or some petty “design choice” fuckup by amazon restricting something, or what). I’ll try find the article later
which comes to mind for me because this choice feels quite a bit like re-attempting keeping that pitch alive while also moving the hard part (and cost centre) elsewhere
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.
Amazon also tried to partner with companies for Alexa skills, so a voice command could buy a Domino’s pizza or call an Uber, and Amazon could get a kickback. The report says: “By 2020, the team stopped posting sales targets because of the lack of use.” The team also tried to paint Alexa as a halo product with users who are more likely to spend at Amazon, even if they aren’t shopping by voice, but studies of that theory found that the “financial contribution” of those users “often fell short of expectations.”
while looking for that I also found these gems (from here):
He wanted it to cost $20 and be controlled entirely by voice. Its brains would live in the cloud, exploiting the company’s Web Services offerings and allowing Amazon to constantly improve it without requiring owners to upgrade their hardware
oh yes tell me again how shitty-and-corp-flavour lcars with extreme reaction latency because of a dc roundtrip is something everyone would want just because it’s $20
Over the next few months, Hart hired a small group from inside and outside the company. Like his boss, he was obsessed with secrecy. He sent out vague emails to prospective hires with the subject line “Join my mission” and asked interview questions like “How would you design a Kindle for the blind?” He declined to specify what product candidates would be working on. One interviewee recalls guessing that it was Amazon’s widely rumored smartphone and says that Hart replied, “There’s another team building a phone. But this is way more interesting.”
“way more interesting” brings to mind that quote regarding “technical sweetness”…
that’s about what I’m thinking too. like, the way people seem to use voice assistants (kitchen timers when your hands are dirty, smart device control since smartphones are weirdly bad at it and there’s no other acceptable ambient interface for this, music/wifi audio) doesn’t match at all with how the companies that make them assume they’re being used for the most part, so there’s every chance most people aren’t engaging with the money-making parts of Alexa (namely the constant ads, data-exfiltrating integrations, and of course the ability to order more shit from Amazon with your voice which everyone I know with an Alexa device disabled immediately for obvious reasons)
it’s entirely possible this LLM horseshit is the make or break moment for Alexa — either it somehow turns a better profit, or they finally have an exit from the voice assistant market
it’s also fucking remarkable how doomed this is. did they talk to none of the people responsible for frog boiling over at Prime Video? come on, we all know the steps:
but amazon’s not doing the above obvious shit they always do in this case, and I think I know why: unlike streaming, people fucking hate voice assistants, so this $5-$10 fee might just be a desperate strategy to get true believers paying (or they’re fine with killing Alexa by making the subscription version mandatory)
what if we enshittified, right, enshittification
I regret to inform you that you’ve been promoted to VP of Innovation
I wonder what the Alexa backend costs relative to user base and data value. Seems like they aren’t likely to get much more useful information than they already get from other sources, and even ignoring the forest-burning hell that is LLMs earlier voice recognition technology wasn’t free in terms of compute.
I think I recall reading something a while back that said the original plan was to make alexa a kind of platform, like a thing that vendors could deliver apps for, but that it completely fell on its arse for some reason (can’t remember now if it was cost or some petty “design choice” fuckup by amazon restricting something, or what). I’ll try find the article later
which comes to mind for me because this choice feels quite a bit like re-attempting keeping that pitch alive while also moving the hard part (and cost centre) elsewhere
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/
while looking for that I also found these gems (from here):
oh yes tell me again how shitty-and-corp-flavour lcars with extreme reaction latency because of a dc roundtrip is something everyone would want just because it’s $20
“way more interesting” brings to mind that quote regarding “technical sweetness”…
that’s about what I’m thinking too. like, the way people seem to use voice assistants (kitchen timers when your hands are dirty, smart device control since smartphones are weirdly bad at it and there’s no other acceptable ambient interface for this, music/wifi audio) doesn’t match at all with how the companies that make them assume they’re being used for the most part, so there’s every chance most people aren’t engaging with the money-making parts of Alexa (namely the constant ads, data-exfiltrating integrations, and of course the ability to order more shit from Amazon with your voice which everyone I know with an Alexa device disabled immediately for obvious reasons)
it’s entirely possible this LLM horseshit is the make or break moment for Alexa — either it somehow turns a better profit, or they finally have an exit from the voice assistant market