Amazon Mulls $5 To $10 Monthly Price Tag For Unprofitable Alexa Service, AI Revamp (reuters.com) 57
Amazon is planning a major revamp of its decade-old money-losing Alexa service to include a conversational generative AI with two tiers of service and has considered a monthly fee of around $5 to access the superior version, Reuters reported Friday, citing people with direct knowledge of the company's plans. From the report: Known internally as "Banyan," a reference to the sprawling ficus trees, the project would represent the first major overhaul of the voice assistant since it was introduced in 2014 along with the Echo line of speakers. Amazon has dubbed the new voice assistant "Remarkable Alexa," the people said. Amazon has also considered a roughly $10-per-month price, the report added.
mmmm in the future. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I used to think they were worth $0 too but then I read all the stories here of mass warrantless surveillance and targeted recordings and sent them all to recycling, determining that their value was potentially highly negative.
I would have much rather flashed them with something open source and self-hosted an assistant.
A shame on all fronts.
OVOS and Neon (Score:2)
This [openconversational.ai] might be of interest to you. It's not for Alexa devices, but it opens the door to non-corporate usability and there are various hardware instances that can serve admirably.
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So you don't want to pay for it, but you expect a ready-made mass produced product that is supported by someone else?
$400 is probably a reasonable price for a low-volume product like an Alexa
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I'm glad you consider $400 to be a reasonable price. Now please go buy more and help finance these companies so they can utilize economies of scale and make something with more mass appeal.
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You don't seem to realise the $50 price of an Alexa is offset by the value of the data they collect from you
Use cases will vary (Score:4, Interesting)
I get quite a bit of use out of these devices. I don't think I'd pay simply to add machine learning services, though... I already have that 100% locally on my computer. But I suppose it depends on what new capabilities incorporating ML would bring. One thing that might immediately change my mind is if these devices were better at understanding what they are being asked or told to do. Particularly if that was multilingual (it already assists by providing basic translation features, but that's not the same as flexibly commanding it in English or Chinese, for instance.)
I would also like the ability to use something other than the few (poorly chosen, I have to say) wake words provided now; but I think that's a hard on-device limitation, not a network service limitation, so I doubt adding ML to the mix the way Amazon is talking about it now would help. But perhaps ML could be used to reliably encode user-chosen wake words and then upload the encoding(s) to the device(s.) That issue causes the most problems with device overall, as they all too often trigger inappropriately during normal conversation.
I would pay for the usage I make of these devices now; they are probably the most broadly useful devices in my home, overall. Smart home features like lights, smart-plugs and operational scenes, the thermostat (still waiting for a floor vacuum that understands about cat puke, sigh); quick reports like news and weather summaries; shopping and todo lists; recipes and cooking tips; delivery notifications and status; alarms, timers and reminders; taking and recalling notes.
They serve as a bluetooth link to dedicated audio systems from my tablet, where I have my music library stored, and for music I don't own, I can ask for a stream and usually get what I asked for because Amazon has a pretty deep library of music. As a musician and a music lover, this has great value to me. I have one in my music studio and use it to command instantly available jam and isolated drum tracks in various genres; that alone is a huge convenience in that context. I want to play and I have an instrument hung around my neck — I don't want to meddle with typing in commands.
I can understand that some people might not be getting a lot of use from these things, but that's not a given. They can be very useful if you know how to manage them.
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I can understand that some people might not be getting a lot of use from these things, but that's not a given. They can be very useful if you know how to manage them.
Think of it this way: I have about four or five Echo Dots, a couple of Echo Shows, and I bought them on the understanding of their current limitations, and I agreed to pay nothing at all to use that limited service. I set an alarm every now and then, I turn lights off and on, and I sometimes annoy other people in the house by playing music on the device nearest them. If Amazon starts charging for that entry level service, they have effectively bricked $500? worth of hardware in my house. No bueno.
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I can understand that some people might not be getting a lot of use from these things, but that's not a given. They can be very useful if you know how to manage them.
I use it to play white noise for sleep, and music to a bluetooth speaker.
I don't care about it having conversational ability, I do care about it having some very straightforward features.
For instance, I have a routine that starts white noise for the baby to sleep every night at 8pm. Ideally this should just be white noise starts playing in the bedroom at 8pm, unfortunately, it lacks conditionals, so I have to tell it to disconnect from the bluetooth speaker (whether or not it's connected) in the routine. Le
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No real market in near or long term for AI service (Score:2)
Obviously the AI engines are expensive to run right now. SO somebody has to pay for that. But who? If amazon sees a competitive advantage to running their own AI, especially for product recommendations for example, then that could make it a business cost they have to absorb to stay competitive. Alternatively, you could get the sellers to pay to have their items promoted. Or you can have the consumers pay with money. Or you could have the consumers pay with privacy (selling their data).
Another way is t
why would I pay for something usless? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:why would I pay for something usless? (Score:5, Interesting)
Alexa is the most useless of assistance I've tried. Google is trying really hard to beat them these days. Why would I want to pay for it? for something that can only order me something from amazon.
In relative terms, $10 a month is roughly what Prime costs. For an assistant to be worth $10 a month, it would have to provide as much value than Amazon's free shipping and Prime Video combined. One of these things potentially provides hundreds of hours of entertainment in a month, and the other potentially saves thousands of dollars in shipping costs. That's a pretty high bar for an "upgraded" personal assistant that will be just smart enough to lie to you blatantly about whatever questions you ask, as LLMs are wont to do.
Even if you compare it with Netflix, we're still talking about hundreds of hours of entertainment. Would I get hundreds of hours of meaningful use out of an assistant? Doubtful.
The real problem with Alexa is that Amazon got this bizarre notion that they would create this product and it would somehow drive sales, i.e. that people would just say, "Hey Alexa, order me a 25 foot garden hose" and get useful results, or at least get something that they won't immediately return for actually being a 25-inch garden gnome. The reality, of course, is that Amazon search is so bad that it takes hours to find something that meets your needs, so nobody does things like that with Alexa. So the bump they expected didn't come, and they can't justify the cost of improving the service based on hardware sales alone, so it stagnates and will likely eventually die out entirely.
I predict that the next step will be the enshittification step, where they make the non-advanced version worse and worse to push people into paying for it, followed by the deprecation step, where they tell you that the basic version is going away because not enough people are using it, followed by the mass "recycling" step where all of this hardware goes to the landfill.
And this is why any product you buy that depends on "the cloud" is always a mistake. It's not a question of whether you have a very limited number of years before they decide it is too expensive and cut you off, but rather how few years it will be. If a product isn't fully functional without relying on a server that you don't own, can't control, and can't replace, then the product isn't really yours. You're just renting it for a while.
Re:why would I pay for something usless? (Score:4, Funny)
or at least get something that they won't immediately return for actually being a 25-inch garden gnome.
You should see what showed up when I asked for a 10" pianist.
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for something that can only order me something from amazon.
This is my biggest issue with Alexa, the fact that it can only be used with Amazon services. I would even consider paying a monthly fee if they opened it up and let other companies developed compatible software. As it is now though the Alexa my brother gave me for Christmas is sitting in a box somewhere and seems destined for the garbage the next time I deep clean.
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Honestly, Google's Nest devices are even more useless than Alexa at this point. The service has somehow degraded to the point where even simple voice commands like "Hey Google, turn on the lights" frequently fail.
That said, I could see Amazon offering "Advanced" AI services on Alexa devices if you already have a Prime account. Giving users an easy way to add stuff to their shopping cart is probably the most profitable Alexa feature for the company, and they wouldn't want to lose that revenue.
thinker (Score:2, Insightful)
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People don't use alexa to think, they use it to do menial tasks like set timers, turn on lights or check deliveries. Sometimes ask stupid questions to get poor responses
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That's consistent with my observation that so many of the use cases for LLMs are for lazy people: summarizing webpages, composing emails, etc. That's a heluva lot of compute and electrical power for "convenience."
Alexa's whole purpose (Score:4, Interesting)
The point of Alexa is to datamine you for profit and direct your impulse purchases to Amazon.
If they're losing money on that, there's hope the whole system will collapse and maybe we'll finally get a break from constant attempts to manipulate us into opening our wallets.
If you can live without the shopping aspect, get a different smart home tool.
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The point of Alexa is to datamine you for profit and direct your impulse purchases to Amazon.
If they're losing money on that, there's hope the whole system will collapse and maybe we'll finally get a break from constant attempts to manipulate us into opening our wallets.
If you can live without the shopping aspect, get a different smart home tool.
That's not really how business analysis works. While I don't have the details on this particular decision path, I would imagine, it it works anything like every other corporation in existence, it went like this:
A) Separate datamining for value from data collection. B) Data collection isn't making money.
C) End users say the service is sometimes alright, but really not great.
D) Marketing and sales tell us if we charge people for what was free and not all that great, we will have created value from a free se
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and maybe we'll finally get a break from constant attempts to manipulate us into opening our wallets.
America won't stop being America regardless of the success or failure of a few marketing tactics. You absolutely will be compelled to open your wallet at every opportunity... and if there isn't an opportunity, then one will be created. Your wallet is a battleground and your wishes are utterly irrelevant and will be entirely disrespected. What a wonderful society it is that values materials more than people. The average mugger has more in common with our "leaders" than they do with the rest of the population
AI is Rohrschach inkblot nonsense. (Score:2)
Let me throw words at you until something sounds like language by coincidence, like a fucking carnie psychic.
Alexa/Echo Use Cases for My Family (Score:1)
The Echo is a fairly nice large digital clock with a bit of weather info.
We primarily use Alexa to turn on and off lights via smart plugs which are not Amazon branded. At Christmas time, I setup a script to turn off all the Christmas lights at a particular time around bedtime.
The Echos we have will display the Ring camera and notifications about Amazon shipments. Sometimes we get weather alerts on them.
I have used the Echo in my home office as a speaker for music but that's only when everyone is asleep and
Re:Alexa/Echo Use Cases for My Family (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty much the same for me. It's a smart light and couple other things controller, occasionally weather, occasionally music (the speaker grouping has been pretty nice for, say, playing music all throughout the house). I hate trying to do any sort of shopping with it, there's a couple fun skills I occasionally play with like Question of the Day, but by and large I don't use or like any of the actual assistant features. It can be okay for quick, fairly easily answered queries but if I'm trying to search for something and need a cycle or four of query refinement, it's slow and annoying to constantly re-ask it. I used to use it for a shopping list, because I'm the kind of person that forgets what I need if I don't put it somewhere, but got out of the habit of that at some point.
I certainly don't need a conversational AI out of it. I have enough real people to talk to if I really want, I don't need to chat with a machine and I don't have any use cases a conversational AI would be any better than what it already does. I use it with Home Assistant as a smart home controller, and there are some third party/open source voice assistants that are probably good enough to cover my needs and use cases. Mainly a matter of hardware at this point - Between the handful of random Echo devices I collected myself for super cheap when they've blown them out at super low prices when new ones come out to a handful given to me by friends who don't need them, I have a pile of the things all over the house now. It'd be nice if they could be hacked/repurposed since by and large they're decent quality microphones and speakers and running Android. There's an XDA forum for them but nobody really seems to have gotten much past a couple bootloader unlocks and some ADB access on a couple of them.
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It's a voice recognition front end for my smart home stuff. The actual work gets done in the hub, which runs Linux of a sort.
Alexa itself is functionally useless to me, except for that. The only practical thing it does is handle playing Audible, which I could do other ways. Its app interface sucks and anything it suggests to me I say no to, and then disable the suggestion. I was given one free Echo device with a screen by Verizon. This thing ends up in a disused bedroom because while it's fine as a sou
So they want to wind it down then. (Score:2)
They already shit the bed on making Alexa be useful by not doing anything with it for the last 2 years or so, so now their Echo device line sales are suffering. So how do you get people that paid for your devices already to willingly give up the service? Start charging monthly for something that's marginally useful, so they opt out and you can wind down your offering a lot quieter after scoring a little more cash off the easily-bilked.
I was gifted an Echo Show, which sits here with the camera blocked and
Maybe AI is posting these Slashdot articles? (Score:2)
Because these dupes are getting ridiculous.
It needs AI (Score:2)
Lots and lots of it.
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I need more cowbell and lots and lots of it
Bye bye Alexa (Score:2)
Re: Bye bye Alexa (Score:2)
LIght bulbs (Score:2)
How we use Alexa (Score:2)
We find Alexa pretty useful for a specific set of tasks. I would potentially replace it, but the hardware cost would probably be several hundred dollars. Our uses...
Playing music (actually via Apple Music which is a skill attached to our Alexa). The tricky part here is we have 5 Echos and use them to play music throughout the house. If you had to ask me what the "killer feature" is for Alexa for us, that would be the multi-room playback capability.
Turn lights on / off. It's convenient to be in bed and turn
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Another monthly fee? (Score:2)
Everybody wants a monthly fee nowadays. What happened to the good old sell-your-data business model? But really, from the point of view of the consumer, in ancient times you could just watch a film and pay for it, buy a newspaper and pay for it, listen to music many times and pay it once. Now films are online and they want a monthly feed to allow you to watch that one film you wanted, and a lot of crap you don't want anyway. Newspapers are online and you cannot pay for one you want to read, it's all or noth
Access the superior version (Score:2)
Amazon ... considered a monthly fee of around $5 to access the superior version.
Is that the one w/o the "AI"? :-)
You must be joking, Amazon (Score:2)
Not worth it (Score:3)
We 4 alexa devices. We use them heavily. And we never use them for what Amazon wanted, ordering things from amazon.
1. Control smart home devices. I do this multiple times per day. Both via automation and voice.
2. Listening to 3rd party audio. Be it SiriusXM, spotify, TuninRadio, Pandora or a few apps for specific services, like the local radio station has their own alexa app.
3. It makes a great alarm clock/timer.
4. Measurement conversions while cooking (Alexa, how many teaspoons of garlic powder to replace a clove of garlic)
5. Weather, current and forcasted
NONE of this is going to make amazon any money. Would I like to have an AI powered version, probably. Would I pay for an AI powered version? Probably not. Now, if they DID take away all the above stuff that I can do now for free, then I MIGHT consider it. I don't like google's hardware. And Apple's stuff is starting to look better with the new AI features, but the problem is most of my lights and switches I bought are not HomeKit compatible. Which puts me putting in something like home-assistant. Which has me buying a Pi.
I won't pay because it's not very good (Score:2)
Ya... if you want to add a prem teir that fine but (Score:2)
They'll just add it to the price of Prime (Score:2)
Because it seems there's no upper bound to what people will pay for that subscription.
Alexa is still by far the best for IoT (Score:2)
Radio stations (Score:2)
The only thing I use Alexa for is listening to radio stations' live stream. I say "Alexa play WFCR" and that's it. That's all I do with it. I wonder if I would need to pay for that?
Alexa (Score:1)
Oh, this will be fun. (Score:2)
You can put together the equivilient of an open source Alexa for what... less than 100$ if you're not worried about performance? You can run an LLM on a pi, download a cheap voice recogntion package, plug in a mic and a speaker... pipe the output from the STT to the LLM and vice versa. Homemade alexa that doesn't use your date to advertise to you. Sure, adding new skills is a little harder, but i guarantee you there are other OSS tools out there that will fix that.
I don't see this going how Amazon want
Alexa, what is...? (Score:1)
(Responds with an entire sermon)
I can't imagine this going well, let alone people paying more for it.
That's one way to get rid of users. (Score:2)
How is this not bait and switch? (Score:1)
Seriously, all the Amazon devices sold as product.
Now being converted into a paid SERVICE or they become non-functional bricks?
Lack of competition? (Score:2)
Amazon has no competition so Alexa, Prime and the rest of it...getting close to be done. Now if only Wallmart et al. stepped in with competitive on-line shoppeing service...eh?
Could go 2 ways (Score:1)