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Only a Small Percentage of Users Buy Stuff Through Alexa, Report Claims (arstechnica.com)
Analysts have been aggressively optimistic in their predictions about the growth of consumer shopping via virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa, but a new report claims that only a small fraction of Alexa device owners shop with voice commands. And most of those who do only try it once or stick to a limited range of products. From a report: Two people who have been briefed on Amazon's "internal figures" told tech business publication The Information that only around 2 percent of people who own Alexa-equipped devices like those in Amazon's Echo line have ever made a purchase with Alexa. Of that 2 percent, about 90 percent tried it once and did not attempt it again after that, one of The Information's sources said. And even those users who regularly use Alexa to shop mainly do so for small purchases like household supplies.
The first type is the most common - people who bought them because they were cheap and looked like a fun toy. These folks all played with it incessantly for a week or two, then put them away (one such friend told me he isn’t even sure where he put it).
The second type are people like my sister. She set it up and still uses it regularly - but only to play background music in her living room. She’s never used it for anything else and is not interested in learning how to do so (although I did teach her younger son how to get it to fart).
The only people I am aware of ever using the Echo for ordering anything are the guys on TWIT.
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I don't have any of these (spy) devices, but can't imagine I'd actually shop for stuff using it - certainly not things I hadn't already purchased before - because there's no way to review the items, like you can using a browser, to ensure it's really what you want. For things I've previously bought and am simply re-buying, like laundry soap, it might offer some, small, convenience, but not enough to have an always-listening device on my house. These things have always seemed more like a solution in search of a problem.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"Hey Alexa, buy me a Toy Yoda"
Alexa: "one Toyota will be parked in your driveway by morning, it will cost 32 thousand dollars"
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
The truth is the Alexa, Google Assistant, etc. are remarkably unintelligent and undiscerning. They can do very constrained and stereotyped tasks fairly well, but introduce a minimum of ambiguity, and they start spinning their wheels badly. Even when dealing with simple queries, their lack of understanding is irksome - e.g. if you tell any of them "Do not, under any circumstances, give me the weather forecast" they all promptly and efficiently give you the weather forecast. It will be some time before these gadgets become useful for significantly more than grins and giggles and party games.
https://xkcd.com/1807/
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