Amazon blew Alexa's shot to dominate AI, according to employees (2024)

> Google has butchered Assistant since the advent of LLMs. My Google Home devices have lost basically all of their functionality

I’ve seen this said a few times lately, yet I’ve not really seen much of an explanation of exactly how it’s regressed.

Maybe it’s just a difference in how we use ours, but it still has worked the same as it always has.

Out uses are fairly basic, but I’m not sure how much more complex it needs to be:

- tell us the current/forecasted weather

- pick random numbers/flip a coin (playing board games)

- ask it for information about X

- play music on Spotify

- carry out actions in our home devices

All of these have always worked, and continue to work just fine. For from “lost all of their functionality” (this feels exaggerated).

Can you/others go into more details on how Google Home has become broken lately?

I have a 20 dollar per month subscription to Perplexity Pro. I can ask it about various topics and it provides me accurate and well sourced information with citations. I have access to hundreds of these searches per day.

To me Perplexity Pro is clearly winning in terms of quality when I use it for this purpose. I have tried the 20 dollars Chatgpt and the 20 dollars google gemini as well. Chatgpt is pretty good and Google Gemini is pretty bad even with the 20 dollars a month but Perplexity Pro is by far the best AI for me. It's gotten even better with the recent Deepseek integration that they have done.

Anyway when I compare Perplexity and Chatgpt with the things coming out of the Big Tech companies I can't help but shake my head. Hasn't Amazon spent billions and billions on Alexa? Even then Amazon is clearly behind...

> ...the new Gemini "replacement" is still by all accounts a disaster

Small nit: the initial rollout of Gemini was a dumpster fire. It is now quite good. For my use cases, I can't get any other current LLM to give me better results than Gemini 2.0 Flash. It's also free

But even that kind of proves your point, right? Pretend you 100% believe me without verifying. That means in a year or two the winner has transferred between ~3 companies. This is not a cheap mantle to keep passing around. The AI wars are going to get heated over the next year or two

Don't forget Apple. They just forced an update on my laptop and now I have a text to image playground that it feels the need to keep telling me about.

All these years how did I live without a text to crappy image generator?

When the Echo started adding “by the way …” to responces without a way to turn that off, I gave up on it. I got a HomePod Mini to replace it and it’s fine.

I’d love to know what the people in Amazon who came up with that thought they were doing. Did they not use the product themselves? Surely they knew their users mostly didn’t want that. Why not add a way to turn that off?

> Overall, the former employees paint a picture of a company desperately behind its Big Tech rivals Google, Microsoft, and Meta in the race to launch AI chatbots and agents, and floundering in its efforts to catch up.

I feel like this is the feeling at every big tech company

Being on the outside looking in it seems like these companies rapidly innovate

But when you actually work at one, it feels like everything moves at a glacial pace and the “right” answers are never the ones implemented

A good friend of mine has worked at Nvidia for years and even he was complaining that “nothing gets done” there

don’t forget kitchen timers! besides music, a top 3 use case is being able to ask for a timer when your hands are messy with ingredients or loaded with a dish going into the oven.

we tried the Alexa/Home lighting solutions this last year and it gets so annoying to ask every morning to turn the lights on. even worse when one of the bulbs drops from the network or the wifi is down.

We ask Google Home for many questions but it’s always “sent the result to your phone”. Things like historical facts, trivia, as we put our phones away during meals and when together as a family but still want to query the world.

I would love a way to ask recipes and have it look up in my NYT Cooking subscription and give me step by step.

I think Amazon hasn't managed to find a way to monetize Alexa. It was Bezos' pet project, and when he left it languished. Our main use for Alexa is to set timers, and alarms to wake up to, and the random trivia question.

> Most people just don't use their Alexa beyond "Play music" or "What's the weather today".

That's because voice assistants are and have always been terrible, and could only play music, tell you the weather, set an alarm, and set a timer with any advantage over any other input method. People who liked using them for these things liked them. If you didn't need them for these things, there was no good reason to put a direct open line to Amazon, Google, or Apple in your house just to read you what wikipedia says about something.

People will love real assistants to death, especially local ones that learn from their personal habits. During the wave of voice assistants, they were promised that futuristic secretary through fraudulent advertising and endless industry marketing, and instead they got talking clock radios connected to advertising companies.

Yeah, I'm in the camp where AI just doesn't offer too much. Especially with how poor it makes the basic timer and radio tasks. It is incredibly frustrating when it falls on the basics.

If anything, I'd love ditching the cloud for the basics.

When it mirrors the exact same experience as talking to a human (OpenAI's "chat," GPT is slowly getting there) yet a human like AI that does everything for you and interfaces with other AI Agent's (big to local businesses to your friends and family's agents) to get things done for you then I believe that's the tipping point.

I use and talk to chatGPT while driving to get things done and as a knowledgebase .... i.e. wanted get my car towed and junked and get best deal. GPT told me nearest junkyards and all details needed like need title & sign over title to them but it didnt interface with local junkyard's AI agent to schedule it all for me & send me an email confirmation or text. I wished it did.

Millions of people have a box in their home that they talk to and have for a decade.

Imagine if that box were able to (somewhat) intelligently answer questions.

I'm sure everyone here has asked Alexa some random type of questions .. sometimes you can get an answer from wikipedia, but mostly it's just "sorry i don't know that", and people settle for a subset of standard voice commands to play music or dim the lights.

Amazon had 10,000 people working on this product for a very long time, and had the lead in market share of a device that people talk to regularly.

It's one of the biggest technology balls to ever be dropped.