This makes sense based on my experiences with Alexa.
Starting in the last two years it has increasingly, and aggressively, started “advertising” skills and products following a voice request. So much so that I began looking into alternative voice engines.
Now I know why it was ramping up so quickly.
I for one just don't like stuff I have the feeling I can't control. With those intelligent loudspeaker and microphone devices I have always the feeling I need to cut the power supply to switch it really of.
Meta and Amazon missed out on smartphones as a platform but both succeeded in other areas (VR headsets and Alexa). I guess it's apparent now that they both overpaid to get there.
I use my Google Nest hub to watch YouTube which shows me ads. I think Amazon should've doubled down on the Echo Show and video content delivery (they do own twitch after all). The real money for platforms like Alexa/echo is content delivery, associated ad revenue, and replacing your telephone -- not as a medium to buy more shit on Amazon. And I think all of this could've been achieved with a 10000+ person division.
If anything, it makes me hopeful a surveillance device wasn’t able to get traction with most folks.
Just a reminder for people that are looking for open source alternative that there is the Mark II that Mycroft is developing for years:
I’m actually considering getting rid of my devices. I just want to play a song, not be constantly pestered about Amazon Music Unlimited and other crap.
With privacy legislation getting strengthened every year it was probably becoming a huge liability.
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I think the real problem was that the product just wasn't what people imagined it would be.
When Alexa was first announced in 2014, I thought, "OK, right now it can only do simple things like play a song on Spotify or tell you the weather. But they're going to iterate rapidly, and in 10 years we'll be talking to it like a computer from Star Trek."
The rapid progress of GPT-3 and friends seemed to confirm this.
But here we are in 2022 and... we're nowhere near Star Trek, nor even GPT-3-ish levels of conversation. There seemed to be a failure of imagination: you wanted some cool sci-fi stuff, maybe shared storytelling like AI Dungeon[0]. But you got triggers for home automation, which 90% of people don't care about.
[0] https://gpt3demo.com/apps/aidungeon-io