Alexa is DEAD (and she has no idea) - Company Forensics

foreign I was in line to watch Interstellar the same week the European Space Agency landed a probe on a comment maybe you were listening to Taylor Swift's 1989 album that had just been released but maybe you were just marveling at how the future had just arrived to us in the form of smart speakers it's called Amazon Echo inside of this thing is the Amazon Echo is like having a genius in your life Amazon has created the Star Trek computer for your home this was so long ago that Marcus Brownlee looked like this and he didn't get a prototype maybe he's sorry about that and that's why Marquez has never reviewed an Alexa that's true story we checked fast forward almost 10 years and you probably own one or two or three or five Alexa's around your home that you got a suppressant or you picked up on a sale for like five cents each Alexa fart but after seeing what real AI can do these smart speakers just seem pretty dumb these days Alexa you're so stupid I am a lot smarter than you and you're not the only one the hype is over the division of Amazon that runs Alexa lost three billion dollars last year and judging by Trends Google and Apple's own speaker assistants aren't doing much different and now you have GPT making these Wes Anderson trailers every week literally passing the medical exam and the bar for almost every state in the U.S how did these huge companies just miss the train the AI train was this even AI what these guys were doing how did open AI which is a company that didn't even exist when Alexa launched how did it beat them at their own game I got together with Enrico tartarosi he's a fellow YouTube Creator who also works as a tech product manager to geek out about product design and figure out how these companies just missed out so badly on this Alexa has been dead for a while and nobody is talking about it welcome to company forensics now ai is going to replace many jobs really soon but a job that we're not really worried about is storytelling we try to tell Chad GPT to start a YouTube channel off its own and it didn't work really well and that's why my team at sliding agency is not really too worried about this because humans are still the best at telling stories for humans for almost 10 years we've helped companies tell their own stories whether it's for their demo day or for their meetings with VCS or crunching their financials to estimate how much they need to raise to the dime we've helped thousands of startups raise hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital and we're not stopping we have a team of designers and analysts and financial analysts who often roll up their own sleeves to help Founders tell the best possible story about their businesses so head out to slidebean.com to learn how we can help you nail your next investor meeting Alexa I'm gonna shoot a video about you you should mute yourself sorry I don't know that one Alexa I'm gonna say some nasty stuff about you go on mute I'm not sure Alexa I'm gonna say some bad stuff about you go to mute foreign people really went crazy for them or her hello I'm here oh hi enough for you to sell out ahead of the holidays by 2019 just five years after launch Amazon had already sold 100 million devices which is actually close to how fast the iPhone sold in the first few years it had managed to make Google and apple Sprint to just create a device and catch up with them it was the start of another Revolution right well really more than Alexa we were crazy about iot in the 2010s let's take a look closer now at the Internet of Things where do you think this is going I mean the Internet of Things my car talking to my washing machine talking to myself I don't know if it was too much of the Jetsons or or that house of Tomorrow cartoon if you remember that this is your house the point is we as a society we were ready for our home to be smart and so we bought smart locks and smart lamps and smart bulbs and smart strips and Wi-Fi and smart toilets they were never cheap by the way it seemed to detect behind those devices had been around for years but they still haven't been able to lower the price for most of these and they definitely have not become a standard in in houses around the world that's a topic for another day but the point is that Alexa was going to help us bring them all together in that same platform and just interacting with her to control our houses but it didn't Alexa turn off the bedroom lights a few things share the name bedroom lights which one did you want see to me there are two big problems with the voice interfaces that we all become used to use like Alexa Google Assistant Bixby and no no not Bixby and the first one is the lack of discoverability of the actions let's say that you are in Microsoft Word you get all these nice buttons and icons and options that you have and each one does a different thing like change the font change the alignment turn on clippy all the possible actions are just displayed right there and you can just click on what you want but with voice interfaces things get a little bit trickier in a utopian World Alexa or Siri will understand natural language so well that they can just interpret what command you want and just execute it hey you just got an email from Mark Lumen what are you talking about oh read email okay I will read email for theodore.com sorry what's Lumen say but the reality is well very different I often find myself using a slightly different wording that's the one the assistants expects like adding a track to my Spotify favorites instead of my liked songs and then suddenly the assistant completely blanks out and doesn't know what to do and this almost magical system just falls apart the promise of voice interfaces is that they are natural but they end up being just memorizing commands that you throw at your assistant for them to do some basic things to me this connects to a concept of that simple something that's simple enough so that your grandma could use it iPhones I think have gotten closer and closer to that and and that has led to mass adoption everybody has a smartphone these days my 75 year old uncle has a smartphone and he has adopted the basics and he can use it smart homes are not that simple they're not even close to simple Alexa was supposed to do it but configuring any smart home device or troubleshooting it setting up the rooms and the zones it's a mess and that goes for most Alexa that adoption that Simplicity is really crucial for any new technology to be an actual Revolution side note on this we actually traveled to El Salvador a couple weeks back to understand about Bitcoin and the fact that it had been legalized as tender in the country we actually went there to see if people were gonna use it or were you actually using it to pay for stuff have a currency that's now legal in their country and you should tune out next week to see how that went because Bitcoin is not that simple this concept is really a test of whether something is going to transcend and whether something can truly reach mass and Universal adoption most people just end up using these devices to play some music set an alarm or just turn on the lights because this is the maximum level of complexity that we trust these devices to handle would you trust your assistant with a command like hey I need a new phone just buy me the best one for my needs and have a ship to my house that requires a very high trust that I think maybe you and your nerd Year friend that knows about phones will even get to do Alexa is Disney Channel PT is a YouTuber with one million 500 000 subscribers Alexa do you know what chat GPT is chat GPT is an AI power chat tool released in November 2022. now this brings me to another crucial factor which is adoption but by developers again you maybe you were saying that comparing Alexis to iPhones is is unfair but for the first four years after they launched they sold a very comparable amount of devices but take a look at apps or skills available in each platform by year four Alexa had about a hundred thousand skills in the platform but iPhones had almost 400 000 apps these devices don't just grow because of how useful they are they grow because we make them useful I mean us startups creators companies believed in the iPhones really smart people quit their jobs and started new businesses because they believed in what this platform would become they believed in the money that they could make by building a product for this platform but not for Alexa to me it comes down to how powerful the thing that you're building your app store or Marketplace on really is if you think about the iPhone apps explosion as a developer you now suddenly have a store that is built upon a new device with multi-touch capabilities cameras and gyroscopes and storage and gpus and Powerful CPU for the time this is what is really powerful it's not the App Store in itself the technology underneath was just killer but when it comes to the Alexa skills the problem is that they are subject to the same technological limitation of even the first party commands that Amazon developed for Alexa the lack of proper feedback the low discoverability of the actions that you can actually do and the fact that you can only get to a certain level of complexity so yes you have that recipes app or The Who Wants To Be A Millionaire game and it's all pretty nice but if you make the equivalence to iPhone apps well these were basically the first kind of apps that appeared around 2008-2009 in the App Store but if you think of chat GPT for example everybody rushed onto it because the technology underneath is just so good shut up it can fit about five to seven standard Karen suitcases which have similar dimensions and capacity holy which is accurate accurate statement is text processing the language processing is finally to a point where people realized you can build some pretty complex with this and that's why now everybody is scrambling to build on top of chat GPT with the plugins or for the API many Alexa skills are just shitty they're not even maintained by the developers or they're just plain useless the tech and this audio only interface is just not good enough to build good products on top of it but maybe more importantly Amazon didn't really care about creating a potential source of income for these developers Alexis business model was a completely different thing and it was broken Alexa why are you dying I'm not crying it's just been raining in the cloud foreign [Music] ready to destroy my Alexa let's just get some random YouTube video about it after removing them I could lift out both the Tweeter and the woofer this is a first generation Amazon Echo they used to sell these for 179 but the components inside them well they cost about 179 several employees at Amazon have revealed that they've always been selling Alexis I'd break even maybe even a little bit of a loss why well first because Amazon has a lot of money they can afford to do that as stupid as it sounds with the promise of adoption and dominance they can sell stuff and even if they're losing money until recently the stock price never seemed to reflect that losing money was a problem for the company and it got Google enough trouble arguably it even killed the first Apple homepod why would you buy one of those if Alexa is just half the price Amazon's original plan was for Alexa to be a device that people would shop with make their daily groceries or even buy that occasional gift but it turns out that shopping is a very complex and nuanced activity committee and the voice interface is just not sophisticated enough to handle it the theory behind this business model was simple and not completely crazy adopted like to enter your home because it's easy you are gonna end up buying more Amazon products so if giving away a device may you shop at Amazon more then your LTV as an Amazon Customer increases that's a good model by the way guys did you hear about this TV that they so they give you away the TV and it has a screen it has the main screen and it's got a screen under it that always only plays ads so you have to have both screens on all the time and you get a free TV but add a constant stream of ads forever whatever you're watching but it's a free TV I mean I think it's a shitty model like I don't I respect my ritual of watching movies but it is kind of like the same idea right like supporting the price of a product through I would never have this no don't mind your data being out there Now's the Time to get on the list before it's too late the problem with Alexa specifically was that this alternative business model it never really worked for them and let me show you why here's an experiment I'm going to show you an Amazon page for just one second and let's see how much information you can figure out from that one second here we go probably this was enough to see what the product was of course the brand the price the amount a little bit of customer reviews at least the Stars maybe even if you can get that tomorrow with Amazon Prime how long does it take to set an order on Alexa versus on a phone Alexa I'd like to buy some tennis balls Amazon's choice is mahik orange tennis balls 12-pack Advanced train balls practice balls it's 18.99 with delivery by May 31st you can say buy it now or save for later no I'd like to buy a can of tennis balls a top result is Wilson championship tennis balls extra Duty single can three balls it's 3.94 with delivery by May 31st you can say buy it now or save for later do you have any cans of pen balls are you trying to shop for can ALS no I'd like a can of tennis balls pen brand are you trying to shop for kind of tennis balls pen brand yes yes second big problem with voice interfaces is feedback in the word of guise or graphical user interfaces the ones that we're all being used to seeing we see the feedback of our actions visually on a screen we can scan the page for the most important stuff and we can absorb huge amounts of information thanks to visual cues hierarchy and a bunch of other visual design rules a top result is Wilson championship tennis balls extra Duty single can three balls it's 3.94 with delivery by May 31st you can say buy it now or save for later Buy It Now okay shipping is 5.99 first the total including the 81 cents want to place your order yes [Music] thanks order place change your mind just ask me to cancel be ordered there you go not only it takes far more for you to hear all the options but you just get inundated with information that are not easy to process and at the end of the day you don't have the idea what is the best product for you and it's because of all these different problems that this assistant just cannot do the more complex tasks like shopping Alexa was supposed to be a shopping enhancer but it never really came close to that but also failed at this other purpose of being smart aside from a few very simple answers from the web Alexa's never really were smart at all chatgpt is smart it's spooky smart enough to literally cause this revolution that we're going through right now and this goes for Siri and for Google Assistant as well they never really got as smart as we had imagined that they would be Alexa is chat GPT better than you from repassion.com chatty is a video and text chat application that uses web Arts no no Alexa stop stream audio Alexa stop Alexa is chat GPT better than you sorry I'm not sure about that going out on a limb here like I would even argue that the success of openai today it derives from the fact that we had been waiting we had been ready for these assistants to be this smart for almost 10 years since Alexa released but another huge blow across the entire ecosystem was Private career online interaction is reported by dozens hundreds even thousands of so-called third parties online in our video a couple weeks back we explored how privacy has become a concern in the past few years people are becoming more aware of how their data is used when people's data is used to flip elections around the world we start paying attention now these devices after all are data collection devices now according to Amazon's terms of service they can store voice recordings to train their models they store these recordings in association with the user accounts unless you disable that now on the other side Google does officially tie the data to the user's profiles even though hear this out they pinky promise that they're not going to use anything that they hear from their Google home devices to Target ads to you quick Apple has completely capitalized on all this privacy awareness and it's the only one of the three where officially voice recordings are not tied to a personal ID the default option is not to store anything of what a Siri hears now as part of gdpr you can request that data to be deleted and you can even request that data to be downloaded and just so you know that what the company knows about you and while this backfired for Alexa now check this guy out that's not his face but we needed to put a face to the story anyway this is a real person it's a real story and thanks to gdpr he was entitled to request the download of all the data that Amazon knew about him and then Amazon accidentally sent him 1700 audios from Alexa from someone else according to the reporter that covered the story The audios that he heard were enough to paint a pretty complete picture of who this person was he had multiple Alexis around the house he talked to Alexa while on the shower there was this woman who visited from time to time and it's a month's worth of of audio recordings from this person I actually had a first-hand encounter with how this data is used really a second-hand encounter my friends who shall remain nameless used to work at this company in Costa Rica who also shall remain nameless who had the task of reviewing the transcripts of hey Google conversations that is hey Google do this that recording gets stored it gets transcribed automatically and then it gets sent to this third-party company overseas in Costa Rica whose job is to review if the transcript is correct against the original audio the point is your voice on these devices is making way around the world now it doesn't stop there in 2019 the New York Times published a piece on how Alexa never actually stops listening it has to listen for the trigger word Alexa to activate the blue light which is a good user experience right you see a blue light assuming that that's the moment when Alexa is listening but no it's listening all the time you actually don't have to yell at it okay it uses far field technology so it can hear you from anywhere in the room the article doesn't really conclude if what we say outside of the context of Alexa blank is is studied or shared or used to Target products to us but we can't just assume that it's not being used her Amazon device recorded a private conversation and sent that recording to a random contact in Seattle I felt invaded like total privacy Invasion unplug your Alexa devices right now and this is all to say that Alexis's struggling product the one's favorite child of Jeff Bezos just stop being that in 2020. Alexa tell me a Thanksgiving joke for Thanksgiving can you let this Amazon worker have a day off that's funny and even if Executives say that they're still committed to the future of Alexa Amazon has been laying off thousands of employees including in this department they've stopped reporting individual Alexa sales which kind of means that it's not something that they really care about anymore or maybe that they can't even brag with anymore now we don't know exact numbers because they report this as a division and this division runs Alexa and Prime video It's called The Amazon's worldwide digital unit they reported three billion dollars in operating losses by the start of 2020 and expert I would say that most of those losses come from Alexa devices it's a money burnout and in an era of optimizing costs and profitability it isn't really clear how long this Burning is Gonna Last for Alexa but let's talk about the future for a second a robot what are we going to do with a robot Astro follow me do you see the robot that Amazon released oh yeah the small room look yeah I can't realize why this is not a meme yet like it is creepy and it is expensive and it is pretty useless I feel like it's not even a PR stunt it's just product that they released for some enthusiasts and just trying things out I think the few videos I've seen on it of it at work I've seen a video from the guys at the studio from the kvhp and they were trying to get out and there were some technical things that are really cool like the fact that it follows you and it can turn around where you are based on where you speak so you can identify where you are that's pretty cool and this whole googly eyes kind of thing but in terms of like Real Deals here it's it's pretty useless at least they could have added the vacuum the future is in real AI you can pick up the pieces today and build something vastly more powerful than Alexa just with the stuff that's available just grab any text-to-speech processing we've had those for over a decade now it's not even novel and most of them are pretty cheap you can plug that to chat GPT and maybe give some training Tech so it gets it's a personality and then you can plug that to something like 11 laps that can even clone your own voice go one step further put a face to it and you get this the problem is the term AI had been thrown very lightly up until today the text-to-speech and the natural language processing Alexa used were good for the time and that was still AI it's just nothing compared to AI today Amazon could update the devices or at least update the AI That's working in the background on their servers to provide the answers if they can do that you have 100 million devices out there that are suddenly as smart as GPT do we think that's possible just hook it up to GPT thing is that upt is not weird for a fast response time here for quality and and basically if you try it out with whatever API you have it's not gonna be as fast as a human talking person to person interaction especially with more promo Flex queries the second thing I believe is the lip cost because I don't know the exact thing years I remember trying out the API but basically it's a few cents per call so multiplied it by 100 million devices and anytime you ask for it it's been a few cents it adds up pretty quickly so I guess what Amazon would do is just build their room I think and if they they might want to do some compromise on speed versus quality of the answer that I think the way they can do it because yes they couldn't integrate PPT today but I don't think it's gonna be a great move for them remember her do you remember her in the movie uh with you know the the guy that falls in love with me it seems that there's there are no pieces of Technology missing for her the film to be real chat GPT is smart enough to pretend to be your girlfriend it's just the interface part right like DBT now is text and you know they haven't moved that to Speech but you know we have all these little pieces of Technology separate is it only a matter of time until somebody builds this it already exists I don't remember where I read it but basically they shut it down for some period or entirely and people got really mad because they were attached to this you know AI girlfriends or whatever that they had where do you think Alexa is five or ten years from now to be honest I think it's really tied to what Amazon becomes to the company in 10 years I think I don't expect a big battle of the Cat spot like a big war Siri versus Alexa versus Google Assistant to be honest it would be far more interesting to me to understand if these big AI models would become monolithical and centralized like everybody is using the GPT or just two or three big models everybody use it or if it actually becomes something much more democratic and open source where there's thousands of models that you can easily customize your own to me that's much more powerful than you know a better Alexa or a better Google so this is a category that's ripe for disruption and I'm really excited about what could happen but for now unless Amazon does anything about it you obviously don't think of Alexa as your assistant you just have to think of it as what it is Alexis today archers glorified Bluetooth speakers actually to Enrico's point we've been secretly working on this new product but since literally since Rico talked about it maybe I'll hint about it we're working on this new platform called teammate which pretty much does that it's it's GPT powered and it lets you have very contextual conversations about your company your business right your pitch deck do all this stuff because it knows and understands your business and it gets smarter about understanding your business we only have a very limited beta available but if you want to check it out you should have to teammatehq.com and let us know what you think bye boss [Music]

Channel: Slidebean

Views: 26,794

Keywords: slidebean, caya slidebean, company forensics, caya, startups, startups 101, alexa, alexa amazon, amazon alexa, Alexa dumb, echo amazon, Alexa device, Alexa doesn't work, chat gpt, ai, artificial inteligence, Alexa devices, Echo

Id: EcCZkFGexXM

Length: 25min 16sec (1516 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 11 2023