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Alexa Is in Millions of Households—and Amazon Is Losing Billions (www.wsj.com)

submitted 4 months ago by just_another_person@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] DrCake@lemmy.world 52 points 4 months ago (3 children)

If their store was good I think more people would be ok buying via Alexa. But even searching on the web or app, the top result is hardly ever the correct thing I searched for

[–] BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.world 40 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I kinda feel like voice search is just an inherently bad platform for shopping.

Supposedly... Home & Kitchen is the most popular category on Amazon, consumer choice comes into that so rapidly that it's hard for it to make sense with just audio feedback or even a tiny screen like the show.

[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 17 points 4 months ago

It could be useful for reordering familiar items but only if prices were more stable or the system reliably gave feedback on how the price compared to previous orders. Now it seems like it's built to try to get you to reorder while masking the fact that the price doubled since you last ordered the item.

[–] altima_neo@lemmy.zip 18 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Not to mention the mess of sellers on the individual items. Sometimes it's Amazon, sometimes it's a rando third party with ridiculous shipping fees and times.

[–] Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 6 points 4 months ago

And counterfeit products

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 5 points 4 months ago

Even when I was an Amazon customer, which I no longer am for the usual reasons, I would never have used Alexa to make a purchase of a physical good. Hell I wouldn't trust it to get "order a 12-pack of diet pepsi" right, I'd get sent the mini cans or bottles or diet caffeine free pepsi or whatever.

Often when I'm looking online to buy something it's because I can't get it locally, which means I'm being kind of particular.

Maybe. maybe. I would use it to make a media purchase of some kind. But I very rarely used Amazon for multimedia; Audible, maybe. I bought one DVD and two streamable movies from Amazon EVER.

And as a Kindle Fire user, I found Alexa to not work very well anyway. Because it's designed for a device that doesn't have a screen, it can't do a lot of things that Siri or Bixby or Android Voice Formerly Google Talk Is Being Replaced With Play Assistant can, and the syntax of "Alexa, ask a skill to do a thing" was just something I wasn't going to fuck with.