"Alexa was getting a billion interactions a week, but most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather. Those questions aren't monetizable."
This is mostly how I use Alexa, but those requests to play music are backed by an annual Amazon Music Unlimited subscription that I wouldn't bother with if I didn't have Alexas throughout the house.
I guess I'm surprised they didn't know this would happen? Why on earth would I shop with Alexa? All price comparisons, reading of reviews and double checking for errors goes out the window. I'm not going to say add paper towels and just trust Alexa to add the best value to my cart. The best it has ever done is remind me when I need to reorder Gatorade powder and I would have ordered that anyway when I was out.
To whatever degree I might have ever done that, because Amazon went to the Marketplace model of putting all seller equal there are 15 duplicates of everything which may have very different prices.
Back when it was only Amazon it may have been possible to Alexa to buy some very specific thing (“buy Mario Party 23 for Switch”) but. Now I wouldn’t be able to trust even that.
So say nothing of worries about kids/guests/accidental activations ordering things.
Giving away smart speakers that are used almost entirely to queue up music from an Amazon music subscription might've been their best approach. Would've differentiated a bit from Spotify and Apple Music. We use ours only to set cooking timers and play things on Spotify, and that's useful enough IMO.
Can Alexa play music without a subscription? My Home Mini will play a radio station if I ask it for a specific band or genre without a sub to YouTube Music.
"Alexa was getting a billion interactions a week, but most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather. Those questions aren't monetizable."
This is mostly how I use Alexa, but those requests to play music are backed by an annual Amazon Music Unlimited subscription that I wouldn't bother with if I didn't have Alexas throughout the house.