UniversalMomentum t1_iycz4bi wrote on November 30, 2022 at 2:10 PM

Maybe for Amazon without charging a subscription, but not for Siri and Google that have become part of the phone platform and leverage their development cost from phone profits.

Amazon should have decent options to expand into senior support and better emergency support in general. Most of these smart microphone speaker are not being used to anywhere near their potential. They have closed corporate structures instead of like at least opening an app store.

That all being said I don't see a big need for more than two major voice services unless Amazon starts making their own phones, maps, calendar and email services like google and apple. The assistants need to be integrated from phone to desktop to home to get the best uses. Right now Google wins at most of that.

Amazon also probably has an option to massively reduce over-spending on Alexa without it being doomed because after development costs it shouldn't cost a ton to keep the service up. It's not like it's a bunch of gears and levers or brains in jars, it's just some voice recognition and simple enough code/responses.

They probably were burning money on development and moonshot ideas, but that might not represent real cost to operate long term.. so I wouldn't doom it yet and there is almost no chance voice assistants will go away from Apple and Google platforms.

Semifreak t1_iyd3k4l wrote on November 30, 2022 at 2:45 PM

You make good points.

Generally speaking about voice assistants, I am still waiting for them to actually get smart. Using them now is too frustrating to really have them be my main interaction. This isn't just not understanding simple commands, but the assistant seemingly completely forgets what you are doing after each one sentence.

I've seen company demos/presentation when you can follow up and carry a conversation (saying something like, "no, not that, the other one", or "no, the other video" and the assistant would follow). But when will that be actually available?

Also, I wonder if any of these big voice players already do other things with their tech like work in the medical field. There are some use in auto chat and phone calls for customer support, but are they sharing and learning from each other and these different industries/markets? Or are they fairly isolated to their phones?

At this stage, voice commands are still in the 'look how cool this is' phase. For my self, I only practically use voice for telling my phone to start a timer or add a reminder- and it is a hit or miss that the phone will do it because correcting that i annoying. You still can't talk to it, just blurb out single simple sentences and between each sentence it feels like you are talking to a gold fish that completely starts a new thought/memory per sentence.

Bringing it all back to the topic at hand, I wonder if Amazon will, can, or should expand their voice assistant to other industries and maybe collaborate with other fields.

I want voice to be actually practical and useful than it is today that it would actually want to make users (and actually assist professionals) more than it does now. For now, for everyone around me, using voice is just a novelty.