This has been promised for a long time, but from my perspective, I don't really see this getting any closer to reality.
But for what it's worth, I think there's a conflict of interest here. No one is going to believe that Amazon won't prioritize Fresh or Whole Foods for these orders - even if they don't.
I use Ocado for my groceries. By default they will deliver based on a combination of things I've marked as "every X unit of time" and a predicted/suggested set based on past purchases. Then I can log in before a deadline to amend it. 90% of the basket typically remains unchanged, and quite regularly I can't be bothered to even log in to check what it's selected for me because I know it'll be close enough unless there's something specific I absolutely need this week.
No reason why Amazon can't do something similar. They only need it to be "good enough" that people start getting used to not always needing to ask for it to list what is in the upcoming order.
How is this any different from a physical grocery store deciding on what to position on the ends of the rows due to incentive? People love to act like these problems brought on by the internet are new but all to often it's just an evolution.
At least my grocery still is reasonably organized and well laid out. If I need ketchup, I know exactly where to go to find all of my options side by side.
If I tell Alexa to order ketchup, who knows what brand I'll get or what size? It's possible I might end up with banana ketchup or even mayonnaise given how poorly Amazon's search functions work.
The only kind of people I imagine would be okay with a 3rd party blind shopping for them would be those who haven't seen the inside of a store in years because they have help that does all of their shopping and domestic work already.
it may also have to do with price insensitive customers.... if you doordash every meal, even groceries from the highest bidder remain cheap in comparison.
> Does usage of the devices lead to increased sales on Amazon.com? Are those sales that wouldn't have taken place on the app/website otherwise?
That seems reasonable. Customers can order directly through the device ("Alexa, order some toilet paper"), that's low friction and lets Amazon rank options to their benefit. Plus regularly using Alexa keeps Amazon primed (no pun intended) in the customer's mind so next time they go online shopping they default to Amazon. Once you're using Alexa, there's an Apple effect encouraging adoption of other Amazon products through ease of use (Amazon Music, FireTV, Audible, etc). Amazon is also monetizing their products with ads, I'm sure that's part of the Alexa strategy as well.
Remains to be seen whether there is a "pull back" from smart devices that impacts the play. I was an early adopter of Alexa... at this point no one in my technical circle has proprietary "smart" home automation devices anymore, and the non-tech folks at best use Alexa to search in the Amazon app (mainly because they struggle with phone keyboards)
Does it? I walk in tech circles, and actively work for a startup, and I don't think a single person in my circle of friends/coworkers has a Home Assistant setup, and _most_ have either an Alexa or a Google Assistant of some form.
But is any of that profitable enough to justify having literally thousands of developers, probably costing a quarter million each on average? That kind of overhead isn't sustainable.
> Does usage of the devices lead to increased sales on Amazon.com?
Yes. We have a few Alexa's and it's helpful to reorder commodities with your voice as you run out of that item (batteries, tape, printer paper, etc). I just add them to my cart and check the price later, but I like it because I'll likely forget to reorder some of those things if I don't do it right away.
Apple and Samsung own our pockets with their devices (and associated platforms), Amazon wants to own the spaces where our phone isn't always close by or easy to use (mostly home and car).
Doubtful they sell at a profit. But do they allow developers for their apps (or whatever they're called, skills I think) to charge money and then take a cut just like any other app store?
I'd imagine like any other new product, they're taking a risk and hoping the product takes off with higher adoption so they can earn more. The bet on Alexa always seemed to be that people wanted a hands-off, voice powered way to interact with the internet, and perhaps they could charge for skills (creating their own 'app store') at some point, or earn more on selling products on Amazon because people would enjoy the convenience of just asking their device to buy more detergent or whatever. Not sure I ever really got the premise here, because it was always quite easy to order stuff on my computer or phone.
Anyway, I don't work at Amazon so I'm not sure if I'm mistaken about what the idea was. I imagine only some people close to that division would really know.
When Amazon Music Unlimited was an attempted thing, that was a direct path to monetization that basically only happens if you have Alexa/Echo widely deployed. Otherwise, it seems a tenuous link to increasing sales in retail.
(I say "was" because they recently rolled part of it out as a Prime benefit a couple of weeks ago, but I can't figure out the exact difference between unlimited and what's included in Prime [and don't care enough to chase it down], but they are still offering a $9/mo unlimited offering, so there must be some difference.)
The difference is that on Prime it's radio-style only. If you ask for a specific song you get a playlist of songs like the one you requested which may or may not include the song you asked for.
A massive limitation for some people, but it fits my usage.
It was perfect timing for me. Google just massively raised their prices for Youtube family so I was looking for alternatives.
There was some belief, I think, that there was an app space for voice apps, similar to mobile. I don't think that's necessarily true, and despite Alexa focusing on making it relatively easy for developers to create their own VUI apps, there hasn't been (as far as I know), any real killer app developed in this space.
Apps on voice are so handicapped - it's really difficult to handle any one-time setup. I wanted to see if I could make a voice app that looked for emails on my third-party mail server but it's just not practical with the stateless function requirement.
The Echo devices are way way too dumb. The user's Cloud account needs app-accessible storage.
The most obvious path to me would be other businesses paying to integrate with Alexa. This would have required a level of platform buy in from consumers that never really materialized though, I think.
No security researcher has ever found proof that they are "always on" and recording everything people say. If they were, it would be front-page news and Amazon would have government investigations.
The devices listen for their wake word before ever transmitting data to the cloud. (This is also because the sheer amount of bandwidth needed for always-on would be un-economical even for Amazon).
This is not strictly true. I examined a master's degree thesis last semester where the student proved conclusively that Alexa devices are periodically spamming bursts of data back to Amazon HQ even when not woken. Beyond a heartbeat, too - MBs of data, not KBs.
No clear idea what that data is, though. There's at least a small chance it isn't benign.
Scope of his work didn't go that far, he looked at several devices and Alexa was notably chatty. He was measuring for abnormal data bursts from IoT home devices - included things like smart bulbs etc.
Do sample recordings, reduce bitrate (you can have good voice recording and playback at less than 3kb/sec) and upload only if the device detects something worthy of notification.
Hell, don't even send the sound, just send a weekly report of events.
What behavior do they hope to collect that is not a huge privacy liability with the effort? They already know where millions of people spend their money (not say they will buy, but actually follow through).
Do they sell the devices at a profit?
Does usage of the devices lead to increased sales on Amazon.com? Are those sales that wouldn't have taken place on the app/website otherwise?