<story><title>Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>SkyPuncher</author><text>This has been my compliant with all of this voice control stuff.&lt;p&gt;The dev teams are so damn focused on being able to answer some esoteric query that you&amp;#x27;re asking as joke, they forget that you only want to do like 5 basic things:&lt;p&gt;* Set an alarm&amp;#x2F;reminder&lt;p&gt;* Read then send a text message (while driving). It doesn&amp;#x27;t even have to be good. Just something that I can send while driving.&lt;p&gt;* Maybe.....maybe ask for the weather.&lt;p&gt;* Turn a named household device on&amp;#x2F;off.&lt;p&gt;* Play a song&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s like these services all completely overlook the actions that you&amp;#x27;d be taking on your phone anyways.</text></item><item><author>thepasswordis</author><text>I use my Alexa all the time, but 99% of it is:&lt;p&gt;Alexa, time!
Alexa, set an alarm for 5 minutes!
Alexa how many minutes left?
Alexa, turn off&amp;#x2F;on all the lights!&lt;p&gt;That’s basically it.  I wrote some apps for it a long time ago to do custom stuff like read me some Reddit pages, but the SDK changed or something and eventually they just died and it wasn’t obvious to me how to recreate it&amp;#x2F;not worth the effort.  I really wish there was an easy way to just put python scripts onto the device or something.  The process of going through Amazon is pretty unnecessarily complex and annoying.&lt;p&gt;I know there are ways of doing this stuff with raspberry pi, but also: not really worth the effort.  If I cared that much I’d just make a PWA for my house and give that to my wife and kids.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saghm</author><text>&amp;gt; Maybe.....maybe ask for the weather&lt;p&gt;I remember one time I asked my Google Home the weather to see if it was cold enough to put on a jacket, and after hearing a temperature that I was ambivalent about, I took a risk and tried asking it what the wind speed was. It started reading out the Wikipedia page for &amp;quot;wind speed&amp;quot; until I told it to stop.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>SkyPuncher</author><text>This has been my compliant with all of this voice control stuff.&lt;p&gt;The dev teams are so damn focused on being able to answer some esoteric query that you&amp;#x27;re asking as joke, they forget that you only want to do like 5 basic things:&lt;p&gt;* Set an alarm&amp;#x2F;reminder&lt;p&gt;* Read then send a text message (while driving). It doesn&amp;#x27;t even have to be good. Just something that I can send while driving.&lt;p&gt;* Maybe.....maybe ask for the weather.&lt;p&gt;* Turn a named household device on&amp;#x2F;off.&lt;p&gt;* Play a song&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s like these services all completely overlook the actions that you&amp;#x27;d be taking on your phone anyways.</text></item><item><author>thepasswordis</author><text>I use my Alexa all the time, but 99% of it is:&lt;p&gt;Alexa, time!
Alexa, set an alarm for 5 minutes!
Alexa how many minutes left?
Alexa, turn off&amp;#x2F;on all the lights!&lt;p&gt;That’s basically it.  I wrote some apps for it a long time ago to do custom stuff like read me some Reddit pages, but the SDK changed or something and eventually they just died and it wasn’t obvious to me how to recreate it&amp;#x2F;not worth the effort.  I really wish there was an easy way to just put python scripts onto the device or something.  The process of going through Amazon is pretty unnecessarily complex and annoying.&lt;p&gt;I know there are ways of doing this stuff with raspberry pi, but also: not really worth the effort.  If I cared that much I’d just make a PWA for my house and give that to my wife and kids.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Chico75</author><text>&amp;gt; * Play a song
Thanks to their newest Amazon Music update, they managed to break this one by only allowing shuffling unless you pay extra for Amazon Music.</text></comment>