You'd really want to show that people bought more stuff due to Alexa than they would have otherwise. Tapping out an order on a smart phone is already pretty damn convenient so that's actually a high bar to clear.

From the article you’re commenting on:

One internal document described the business model by saying, "We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices."

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.

Why would they need to spend billions on validating that model though? Wouldn't it be enough to have just a 1000 or even 100 devices to test it?

We have I think… 5? Echo devices in my house, including an echo dot Amazon just sold me for $1 because it was my “Primeaversary". I haven’t purchased a single thing through them.

"Hey Alexa, I need a new pan, mine is old and broken" - "I have the Pan Frying Pan Cooking Pan Cooking Children Family Happy Best Pan from Fhrgwdsst for $14.99, would you like me to order it for you?"

I think my favorite notification was a few months ago—my echo speaker turned yellow because there was a notification. My kids find this incredibly exciting, and told Alexa to play it. And then Alexa announced to us, in breathless terms, that bananas are a good source of potassium. It even said "this is B A N A N A S", as only a robot can.

Maybe, but it wasn't funny so much as dumb and pointless. And: no, I just use it as a speaker and for setting timers.

Very curious why you would wiretap your home with 5 always-on internet-connected speakers running opaque software for a tech giant.

I dunno, it's the sort of thing that would be fit for a robocop-like dystopia just a couple decades ago but is seemingly... "normal" now.

Because they're convenient. In my house, you'll hear - Alexa, when is the Bills game? Alexa, when is daylight savings. Alexa, play Christmas music. Alexa, what is the etymology of wanker? Alexa, is Chipotle still open? Alexa, how old is Patrick Maholmes? Alexa, what time is it in Kenya? Alexa, ad nauseum.

If Amazon wants to datamine the dickens out of that to sell me more socks and USB cables, I really don't care.

Isn't this the most trivial and minor of conveniences? Wouldn't it take roughly the same amount of time to pick up your phone and type that? Don't you feel the least bit uncomfortable that the trade-off for that is that a tech giant gets a 24/7 audio feed into your and your family's home?

Boggles the mind.

The expected value of harm caused by tech giant listening to my house = 0. Trivial and minor > 0.

Actually Alexa gets most of those same requests in my house, too ;-) Anyway, it's at 12:30.

We leave most of them on "mute" most of the time. The one we don't, we use to play music, mostly.

There is no such thing as mute

Maybe. The cameras have a physical shutter that you can keep closed, but the mute buttons are always just an electronic button that you have to trust Amazon to respect. Still, I don't think I've seen anybody claim that Amazon is lying about it, and there's enough people on the internet—especially here—that monitor their traffic, and would have noticed if echo devices were sending recordings that they shouldn't have taken.

Not everyone's paranoid about that kind of thing and not everyone actually values privacy that much