The Daily Telegraph - Features
Our love affair with the ‘spy’ in the corner of the kitchen is on the blink
Amid billion-dollar losses, Harry de Quetteville charts Alexa’s decline from an everything machine to a glorified clock-radio
For more than a decade now, they have been burrowing into our lives – those little electronic devices in the corner with the glowing light. “Alexa,” we say, as we drop an egg into the saucepan, “set a four-minute timer.” Or “Alexa, play Bach’s Cello Suite No1.” And as the sound of Pablo Casals fills the room, all seems right with the world.
But then the children rampage through the door. “Alexa, play Poo Poo, Bum Bum!” And your peace is ruined. Because, yes, it turns out that songwriters have cottoned on to the scatalogical bent of the world’s youth, and produced a catalogue of songs to cater to them.
Or else Alexa appears to be partially deaf (“NO ALEXA!! I wanted the weather in Rotherham not Rotterdam!”); or slightly creepy, piping up, “I’m sorry I’m having trouble understanding you right now” when no one has said anything. (Things could get creepier still if Amazon, the tech giant behind Alexa, pushes through plans for it to emulate the voice of dead relatives so that they can speak from beyond the grave.)
No wonder then that we have a love-hate relationship with voice assistants like Alexa and the smart speakers “she” communicates through. According to internal Amazon data seen by Bloomberg, only a little over half the owners of Amazon’s “Echo Dot” Alexa device use it each week. Worse, as many as a quarter of new Alexa users give up on their devices after just a fortnight.
Now, it emerges, Amazon may be giving up a little on Alexa, too. Or at least significantly cutting back the division behind it, which has come to look bloated, as Silicon Valley undergoes its biggest retrenchment since the dot-com bust of 2000. After two decades of hell-for-leather growth, the tech giants are laying off workers (some 130,000 so far), cutting budgets and pausing recruitment. Amazon is no exception.
And the Alexa division looks plumper than most, home to a huge roster of staff – in a single year, 2019, it doubled its workforce to 10,000. That’s quite something for a department that, according to recent reports, is losing as much as a billion dollars a month – far more than Amazon’s other business units – and for a product which has passed the “growth phase”, so that sales are slowing. Announcing lay-offs, David Limp, the executive in charge of Alexa, wrote to his staff last week: “It pains me to have to deliver this news, as we know we will lose talented Amazonians.”
It is a message he would not have been delivering had Alexa lived up to its creators’ grandest expectations, enabling a vision in which we accessed the internet’s torrent of information through it, while it acted as the hub for a network of “smart devices” in our homes - from lighting to internetconnected fridges.
The trouble is, in the eight years since launch, it remains far from becoming this “everything machine”. Instead, statistics reveal that, overwhelmingly, Alexa owners use it to do a limited number of things: set a timer, play songs and check the weather. This despite a roster of Alexa apps (known as “skills”) numbering in the tens of thousands. As tech
Instead of saying ‘Alexa, open the curtains’ most of us find it easier to open them ourselves
analyst Benedict Evans waggishly put it, critics might argue that Alexa is nothing more than “a glorified clock-radio”.
It is a painful reverse. The problem is that customers are hardly scurrying to make their homes “smart”. Instead of saying “Alexa, open the curtains” and hearing a motor whir away, most of us find it easier to open the curtains ourselves. Sometimes it can seem as if Amazon is waiting for old-fashioned consumers to catch up. Perhaps that’s why Amazon’s Ring home security drone, which flies around your house filming potential intruders, is not yet taking off as a massmarket gadget.
Such camera- and microphoneencrusted gadgets also prey upon an enduring weak spot of Alexa – privacy concerns among customers who worry that the smart speaker is eavesdropping on their deepest secrets and delivering them to the company that Jeff Bezos built. And sometimes Amazon staff have reviewed recorded conversations, – though to improve Alexa’s understanding of speech rather than anything malicious. Alexa can even start listening in if anyone, even a child or the television, inadvertently uses the word that “wakes up” the device.
Yet privacy and questionable usefulness have not stopped it being incredibly popular. Alexa was a surprise hit when it launched in 2014 and proved a triumph for Amazon over its direct rivals. By popularising a nifty new device the company beat Apple at its own game; and by popularising artificial intelligence it did the same to Google. Soon Amazon was shipping millions, then tens of millions, of its devices, with the total estimated to hit 130million by 2025.
The problem has been that, for Amazon, selling smart speakers was never the point. Rather, the aim was for owners of Alexa to use the speakers to buy more stuff from Amazon – “Alexa, order me eight AA batteries…” etc. “We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices,” noted an internal Amazon document obtained by Business Insider.
It didn’t turn out like that. Instead
we carried on using it to set timers and settle family disputes about how tall the Eiffel Tower is.
Yet for a company which has long been committed to taking bold bets and investing in new products, it has been tempting to stick with it. Especially because, within the company, Alexa is a project known to be dear to Bezos’s heart. Even today, Amazon says it is “as optimistic about Alexa’s future as we’ve ever been” and that “it remains an important business and area of investment for Amazon”.
That, despite employees briefing reporters that, recently, cheap, mass-market Alexa devices are now out of favour at Amazon, with Bezos more charmed by Astro – its niche, expensive, Alexa enabled, foot-and-a-half tall home robot which can trundle around the house after you. And, like other tech companies, including Apple and Google, Amazon is increasingly focused elsewhere, on the intersection between tech and healthcare, as a future moneyspinner.
Such a fall from favour is perhaps the end of the affair for voice control – once touted as the way we would all be engaging with the internet. For consumers have come to realise that it’s not as nimble as it seems. Alexa may have thousands of “skills” but how do you explore them?
One day, perhaps, Alexa will become an example of the old trope in the tech business that exciting new advances don’t always lead to great products, and great products don’t always make lots of money. Eight years ago, the AI-powered advance was in voice recognition and computerised speech. Alexa was born.
Now AI is going through another great leap, with algorithms that create incredible text and pictures. What crazy, exciting products will be born? The only thing that is certain is that turning such products into profits will not necessarily be easy. “For technologists hacking away on side projects, this is an amazing time to build,” notes David Peterson, partner at the venture capitalists, Angular Ventures. “But for investors and founders trying to build longlasting companies, this is a dangerous moment.”