By will-buy
Updated with comments from Amazon throughout.
The greatest obstacles for Amazon’s ambitious Alexa plans are boredom with the voice assistant along with a precipitous stop by smart speaker sales, according to internal Amazon memos first reported by Bloomberg Businessweek. The gathering of 2023 to 2023 documents indicate years when only 85% of new Alexa users continue to be interacting with the voice assistant following a week even while the company reported this past year that the smart speaker market’s growth have reduced to 1.2% annually and can likely live there for quite some time. Amazon vehemently pushed back against the claims from the Bloomberg report. The company said that the vast majority of customers who register their devices are active a month later and beyond which they’re as optimistic about its future as always.
“The assertion that Alexa growth is slowing is not accurate. The truth is Alexa is constantly on the grow-we see increases in customer usage, and Alexa can be used in more households all over the world than ever before,” Amazon spokesperson Kinley Pearsall told Voicebot within an email. “Tens of millions of customers use Alexa every day, and we are as optimistic about Alexa's future today as we have ever been.”
Alexa Limits
The bits of the documents shared in the report provide a stark contrast towards the rosy picture Amazon usually paints of Alexa’s place in people’s lives. Even when users keep Alexa devices around for more than a week, that doesn’t mean they'll build relationships its full capabilities. A 2023 Amazon memo described how new Alexa users have already found half of all the Alexa features they will ever use within three hours, although Amazon responded it's from 2023 and never accurate anymore.
Amazon spends lots of money on Alexa, with 2023 fixed-cost projections of $4.2 billion and most 10,000 employees focusing on something related to the voice assistant. The company’s wants Alexa resulted in individual Echo devices have always been sold at a loss. A 2023 projection suggested $5 lost for each device in 2023, improving to simply $2 of profit for a device in 2028. The point was to get Alexa into as many homes as possible and make money by leveraging Alexa like a gateway with other Amazon services.
That Amazon found a quarter of U.S. households have at least one Alexa device doesn’t mean much when they aren’t used plus they won’t buy anymore. As Voicebot has found in repeated surveys, setting timers, playing music, or answering basic questions are probably the most popular ways to use voice assistants. Amazon noted they are popular, but not the only popular features, adding that communications smart home controls, shopping, streaming video, and Alexa Routines will also be commonly used. Amazon’s documents also acknowledge the ongoing privacy concerns which make people concered about voice assistants and smart home devices as a major impediment to more growth.
Ambition Over Cost
Negative numbers and projections don’t mean Amazon will discount Alexa and Alexa-enabled devices. Plans for multi-camera smart devices full of better sensors are contained in the more pessimistic projections of slowed smart speaker growth. The rapid-fire release and continual updates to Alexa devices and features just in the last few years clarifies simply how much Amazon believes in Alexa. Even an abridged list would need to encompass motion and sound activation, automotive devices and software platforms for drivers, headphones and smart glasses for pedestrians, bigger smart displays and smart TVs that may too be called smart displays, as well as hiring stars of Hollywood, Bollywood, and also the North Pole to become alternate Alexa voices.
Whether or otherwise those are sufficient to obtain individuals to use Alexa more is harder to evaluate. Amazon is trying simple ideas like suggestions for things to try whenever a user foretells Alexa, adding tips to widgets on Alexa device screens, and audio app advertising tests. These may really make a difference or simply annoy users who don’t wish to extend their interaction, but the company is optimistic nonetheless. Amazon responded to Bloomberg by contesting some of the numbers as wrong or outdated and claimed that there’s continued growth in sales of Alexa devices a rise in usage as well, giving reason to become bullish about Alexa’s future. That could be a global perspective, though, as
