Không thể mãi "cố đấm ăn xôi" với trợ lý ảo Alexa

mảng kinh doanh Alexa là thất bại thảm hại của Amazon, sẽ tiến tới lỗ 10 tỷ usd trong năm nay,

trong khi Alexa là thiết bị bán chạy nhất của Amazon, mà là do bán lỗ, "muốn kiếm tiền từ khi mọi người dùng thiết bị, chứ không phải từ khi họ mua thiết bị", nhưng kế hoạch này không bao giờ thành hiện thực, người dùng chỉ hỏi câu vớ vẩn, lăng quăng về bài hát, về thời tiết, chứ chẳng bao giờ mua hàng gì qua Alexa cả (ai mà tin "trợ lý" với tiền/cách tiêu tiền của mình cơ chứ)
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Amazon is going through the biggest layoffs in the company's history right now, with a plan to eliminate (loại trừ, khử) some 10,000 jobs. One of the areas hit hardest is the Amazon Alexa voice assistant (trợ lý giọng nói) unit, which is apparently falling out of favor at the e-commerce giant. That's according to a report from Business Insider, which details "the swift downfall of the voice assistant and Amazon's larger hardware division."


Alexa has been around for 10 years and has been a trailblazing (tiên phong) voice assistant that was copied quite a bit by Google and Apple. Alexa never managed to create an ongoing revenue stream, though, so Alexa doesn't really make any money. The Alexa division is part of the "Worldwide Digital" group along with Amazon Prime video, and Business Insider says that division lost $3 billion in just the first quarter of 2022, with "the vast majority" of the losses blamed on Alexa. That is apparently double the losses of any other division, and the report says the hardware team is on pace to lose $10 billion this year. It sounds like Amazon is tired of burning through all that cash (đốt tiền).

...while Alexa's Echo line is among the "best-selling items on Amazon, most of the devices sold at cost." One internal document described the business model by saying, "We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices."

That plan never really materialized (hiện thực hóa), though. It's not like Alexa plays ad breaks after you use it, so the hope was that people would buy things on Amazon via their voice. Not many people want to trust an AI with spending their money or buying an item without seeing a picture or reading reviews. The report says that by year four of the Alexa experiment (thử nghiệm), "Alexa was getting a billion interactions a week, but most of those conversations were trivial (lặt vặt) commands to play music or ask about the weather." Those questions aren't monetizable.

Amazon also tried to partner with companies for Alexa skills, so a voice command could buy a Domino's pizza or call an Uber, and Amazon could get a kickback. The report says: "By 2020, the team stopped posting sales targets because of the lack of use." The team also tried to paint Alexa as a halo product with users who are more likely to spend at Amazon, even if they aren't shopping by voice, but studies of that theory found that the "financial contribution" of those users "often fell short of expectations."

Alexa in third place in the US voice-assistant wars, with the Google Assistant at 81.5 million users, Apple's Siri at 77.6 million, and Alexa at 71.6 million.

Tags: finance

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