They will be fine. If that asshole can afford to go to space and argue that workers rights are unconstitutional then they can eat it. It’s called capitalism.
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
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.
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.
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.
I coded an Alexa Skill once. It was tedious and a garbage platform. After a while it was delisted for spurious reasons, even worse DX than Google and Apple app stores. Complete dumpster fire from start to finish.
All obsolete now that LLMs are here. I don't think any devs will miss it.
Alexa and LLMs are fundamentally not too different from each other. It’s just a slightly different architecture and most importantly a much larger network.
The problem with LLMs is that they require immense compute power.
I don’t see how LLMs will get into the households any time soon. It’s not economical.
Alexa skill store is a “prime” example of Amazon’s we don’t give a shit attitude. For years they’ve turned their back on third party developers by limiting skill integration. A well designed skill on that store gets a two star rating. When everything in your app store is total shit - maybe the problem is you Amazon?! It’s been like that for years ; I completely avoid using skills as they only lead to frustration.
LLM integration into an Alexa device could be a big improvement, but current speed performance at that scale seems concerning that we’d get a laggy or very dumbed down system. Frankly Id be happy if Alexa could just grasp the concept of synonyms and also have the ability to attempt second guess interpretations of speech comprehension rather than assume user has just asked the exact same question in rapid succession but with a more frustrated tone.
You don’t need an Alexa for that, anyway. I have LCARs touch panels around my house plus the HA app on my phone with custom interfaces for all of them.