> Close to 10K employees for a product that they don't even know how to monetize.

Or work consistently.

"Alexa play music".. Nothing... Do it a few times and it finally does play music? I could have gotten up and done it myself easier/faster at times.

the links and offering is solid. I have spotify connected to my amazon account and this is NICE..but as i said, the inconsistency is frustrating.

Alexa is funded by retail’s profits.

Retail has no profits. AWS is the profit center.

and advertising

Retail has no profit after all expenses. One of those expenses is Alexa

What needs to be distinguished here is retail as in Amazon procuring and selling goods, or retail as in Amazon being a platform and another version of Aliexpress.

The former is a low single digit profit margin business, the latter probably has a decent profit margin.

Alexa does seem like it has fantastic potential. To throw so many resources at it with so little result seems like an incredibly massive failure of management.

I think Siri and Alexa are simply at the end of their roads. To move Siri and Alexa ahead, we'd need a general AI so powerful, it would change the whole world.

I wonder if, within my lifetime, it will be possible to tell a digital assistant to "order all the ingredients I need to bake the cinnamon buns as detailed in the cinnamon bun baking video I watched last month with the Chinese lady that doesn't have an accent"?

Based on the capability of state of the art language models, we may get that soon. The technology largely exists, but the compute is still too expensive. Rumor has it that GTP-4 will be able to pass for human-like.

Right, the missing step to make these assistants actually-useful beyond very simple tasks like "play [album name]" or "set a timer for 5 minutes"—which are basically just a voice-driven command line—has almost nothing to do with voice recognition per se and is more-or-less identical to the problem of "invent AGI".

It'll be useful when you can have it create, say, a menu and shopping list for your week, interact conversationally to tweak it including understanding that something like "I'm allergic to that ingredient" means never ever try to include it again while other statements of preference may be much softer, learn your preferences so those conversations get shorter every week, and order the ingredients for you, too. It barely matters if that happens over keyboard input or voice, because the hard parts of that problem have nothing to do with how the input is done.

even a "voice-driven command line" would still be pretty useful if it actually worked reliably. Google's implementation misinterprets my parents' address about 50% of the time, choosing some town I've never visited in another state as the most likely alternative. I navigate to that address at least once a month, and I even have it as a saved place in maps.

The voice recognition (given decent hardware and a fairly vanilla accent) is quite good. The problem is being able to integrate, present options, learn preferences, etc. even to the degree of that subpar assistant who you only keep paying because they're the daughter of your mother's best friend.

You want to be able to give a few parameters for a trip you're taking and get some choices back. But, as you say, that's far more about "intelligence" than the type of input.

There's a The Smile song called "You'll Never Work in Television Again." Last week I said "play <name of song>" and Alexa responded that it could not find a playback method called "television." I tried to annunciate more clearly and it replied "OK, playing <song name> on repeat," because the song title ended with the word "again."

Nothing reminds you about the difficulty in cleanly parsing human language more than trying to work through a voice interface. I'm not sure what is missing precisely, but I'd say "an ability to use semantic understanding" might be helpful. All of our AI works explicitly with no understanding of semantics, but it's becoming clear to me that the ceiling that places on their "intelligence" puts them still leagues away from the world of true AGI.

If there was also a screen, so many more things could be done. For example it could show that list of ingredients and their prices, for your approval. Then let’s say you could interact with that screen by voice (your fingers are sticky because you’re cooking now) or touch.

There is one in Amazon Echo Show. I've never used one though so I don't know how useful it is in practice. The thing is though that I'm never far from a computer in my house so I'm going to one of those for anything remotely complex.

Alexa was Jeff’s pet project. Management failure, indeed.

Failure for whom? The shareholders, sure. But Alexa is pretty cool. It is the first voice interaction that I have used that actually works. So good for Jeff.

> don't even know how to monetize

Amazon music subscriptions are $15.99/month. Doesn't that count? Sure, you can buy that without an Alexa, but that is the whole reason people do.