Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

Business model & strategy

• Many argue Alexa never had a clear, honest path to profit: it was justified with fuzzy “downstream impact” metrics (brand lift, extra Tide Pod sales) that were easy to game and hard to prove.
• Commenters see a classic “build scale then monetize” failure: huge org (thousands of people, multiple services per feature) built on the assumption of voice shopping that never materialized.
• Some view Alexa as a loss‑leader / marketing channel that helped lock in users to Amazon Music, Prime, etc., but not enough to justify ongoing losses.
• There’s broad skepticism that a new “AI Alexa” can be profitably run, given LLM compute costs versus what users will pay (few would pay $20/month just for voice control).

How people actually use Alexa

• Reported real‑world usage is narrow:
  • Kitchen timers, alarms, clocks.
  • Music/radio/podcasts (often via Spotify, sometimes Amazon Music).
  • Simple factual queries, conversions, weather.
  • Smart‑home control: lights, thermostats, TVs, intercom/announcements.
  • Shared/shopping lists; package delivery alerts.
• Many note Alexa has gotten worse: more misrecognition, timers failing, wrong music, and intrusive “by the way” upsells.
• The Alexa app and “Skills” ecosystem are widely described as confusing, buggy, and poorly designed; feature discoverability is low.

Why voice shopping failed

• Strong consensus that almost nobody wants to buy “sight unseen” via voice:
  • Users want to see product details, prices, quantities, and reviews.
  • Amazon’s marketplace is seen as chaotic: volatile pricing, many near‑identical listings, 3P sellers, counterfeits, misleading unit pricing.
• This eroded trust makes “Alexa, order X” feel risky; at best people use it to re‑order exact past purchases or add vague items to a list, then buy manually later.
• Dash buttons and Subscribe & Save are cited as examples where price swings and substitutions broke blind‑ordering trust.

Subscriptions, openness, and alternatives

• Many reject paying a recurring fee to control lights or timers on hardware they already bought; others would pay modestly for a privacy‑respecting, non‑salesy assistant.
• Some want devices to be unlockable or flashable with open‑source firmware once Amazon abandons or monetizes them differently.
• A chunk of users are moving to Home Assistant, Hubitat, local storage cameras, or even simple “dumb” devices to avoid cloud dependence and surveillance concerns.

Organizational and technical critiques

• Internal culture is described as metric‑driven, political, and prone to “empire building,” making it hard to pivot or integrate modern LLM capabilities cleanly.
• Several see Alexa as constrained by Amazon’s retail incentives: hard to build a genuinely user‑centric assistant when the primary goal is to sell more Amazon stuff.