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AI Technology

Amazon Sees Alexa Devices More Than Double in Just One Year (cnet.com) 65

Posted by msmash from the it's-spreading dept.
It took Amazon four years to populate the world with 100 million Alexa-powered devices. It took the company just one more year to more than double that number. From a report: The e-commerce titan announced Monday that there are now "hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices" in customers' hands worldwide, a massive increase from the 100 million it announced last January. Both figures include Amazon's own lines of Echo speakers, Fire tablets and Fire TV streamers, as well as third-party devices like lightbulbs, sprinkler systems and motorcycle helmets, showing how much Alexa's world has broadened. Smart-home engagement with Alexa nearly doubled, too, with people using the voice assistant for smart home controls hundreds of millions of times every week. The company revealed these new milestones at the start of CES, the biggest tech show in the world, where it will present a slew of new partnerships in cars, TVs and connected homes to keep up Alexa's breakneck growth.
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Amazon Sees Alexa Devices More Than Double in Just One Year More

Amazon Sees Alexa Devices More Than Double in Just One Year

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  • giving em away (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06, 2020 @09:59AM (#59591978)
    maybe it has something to do with them giving them away in every imaginable way? buy a new microwave, have an alexa! just bought some new slippers? well you need an alexa too!

    • Bought an Alexa? Get a second one for free!

    • Sirius gave me one for reducing my service down to a single streaming account. I was going to put it on eBay but they sell new for $25 so that's not even worth my time. The redemption code is still in my inbox.

    • That's why the engagement numbers matter more than number of units, but that grew also: "Smart-home engagement with Alexa nearly doubled, too." (Unless other types of engagement shrunk).

  • Nice company (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tsa ( 15680 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @10:02AM (#59591988) Homepage

    Always handy, a device that listens to you all the time that you're near it and sends it to its hive. I always needed that.

    • well worth it not to get up every time my wife wants to turn the lights on or off or change the AC temperature

      • You should never change the AC temperature. It's supposed to be 110V at 60Hz.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Gonoff ( 88518 )

          It's supposed to be 110V at 60Hz.

          Or 220V @ 50HV on most of the planet.

          Actually the voltage is not too important but having one cycle every 0.02 seconds does make for simpler sums...

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Grow a fucking spine and tell your wife to get her lazy ass up if she wants to change the temperature or lighting. That's the epitome of laziness. She's too lazy to do it so she asks you, and your too lazy to do it so you put always listening devices in your home.

      • well worth it not to get up every time my wife wants to turn the lights on or off or change the AC temperature

        And some people wonder why so many Americans are obese.

        Most human beings have some useful attachments for doing such things. They're called "limbs". Using them frequently and energetically is essential if you want to stay healthy. It also helps keep you warm.

    • Re:Nice company (Score:5, Insightful)

      by iONiUM ( 530420 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @10:10AM (#59592006) Journal

      Maybe I'm getting old, but I really don't understand the benefit of these devices. If I'm going to check the weather for example, I'd much rather see it in a graphical format that the web and app's provide which allows me to see exactly what the next 5 days will be in terms high / low, % chance of precip and amount etc.

      If I'm going to check the news or search for something, I'd much rather visually see all the articles and scan them quickly then have it read out to me.

      So what exactly is the benefit of these devices? Why are people using them? I am confused.

      • A lot of those devices have a built-in display.

        I guess people are becoming even more lethargic with each new generation. It seems that now it's too much work to pick up a tablet and open a weather app.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by iONiUM ( 530420 )

          How is that just not a phone then? Why not just use your phone and use Siri or Google or whatever if you want to chat with your device?

          • Because then you need to carry your phone on yourself while inside your home. It's cheaper to have an Alexa device in each room, or whatever*.

            * still trying to guess from the point of view of lazy people, I still hate those spying devices.

      • So what exactly is the benefit of these devices? Why are people using them? I am confused.

        1. It saves lazy people making even minimal effort.

        2. It helps to create the illusion that you are living in "Star Trek".

        3. If your friends, relatives and neighbours don't have it - or have a less expensive type - it shows how superior you are to them.

        • 3. If your friends, relatives and neighbours don't have it - or have a less expensive type - it shows how superior you are to them.

          Nobody is going to be impressed by an Alexa. You can get one for $25.

          Most of the smug status seekers trying to assert their superiority are people bragging that don't own one. E.g.: you.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Anonymous Coward

        So what exactly is the benefit of these devices? Why are people using them? I am confused.

        People are stupid and stupid people like shiny, new, pointless gadgets.

        A while back I saw a television commercial for the phone that Amazon was selling at the time. (Fire? Don't remember, don't care.) A husband and wife are sitting in their living room, trying to decide what movie they want to watch on their shiny new Amazon phone.

        I have a 55 inch television in my living room, and a 32 inch 4k monitor on my computer. Both of which cost less than many phones. And I'm going to watch a movie on a 5 inch p

      • Extreme convenience and they are really cheap so why not.
        For instance just in the bedroom. The nightstand light comes one before the time I normally go to sleep. I go in tell it a command it starts to play the radio stations I like listening to. I can shutoff the light with voice instead of reaching for it. I verbally shutoff the radio if I don't want that or to change stations if I want something different. Then if I fall asleep without shutting the stuff off it will automatically do it after 2 hour

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cusco ( 717999 )

          Mostly we use them to stream music, the newer Dots have a pretty good speaker, the older ones had an output jack that could plug into our (very old) stereo. Rosa like to check the weather at the cottage to see how her Airbnb guests are doing, and checks the traffic that direction before heading there to clean up. When no one is staying at the cottage we turn a light on and off through the Echo and sometimes play music there so that it's not obvious the house is empty. We use them to talk hands-free to ou

      • my echo studio is a smart speaker, my computer speaker and gives me access to free info like news and weather so I don't have to pay for TV. and my kids use it for homework. and it doubles as a smart home hub so I don't have to get up to turn the AC on in the summer time. and my utility pays me like $225 every summer for having smart AC's they can turn the temp up remotely to save money.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by iONiUM ( 530420 )

          I have SmartThings and use Z-Wave including a Z-Wave thermostat which control AC, window blinds, vents and whatever else I want (locks, lights etc.) smartly. It has a nice UI control mechanism on the phone, although you can go deeper with automation, even so far as programming against it if you really want.

          So that is not a good argument, since the only thing you have added is the 'speech' portion, but ST supports that as well (I just don't use it).

          Since the news and weather are already free without cable su

      • Phones/Internet have become nearly ubiquitous. Vast majority of the world is barely literate or worse. Even in america 14% of adults are illiterate [wikipedia.org], probably add another 20% for illiterate children. Some percent of these illiterates are also incapable of speech, but that is a far smaller percentage (https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/caregiver-located-after-child-found-wandering-alone-in-gas-station).

      • I'm still wary of the smart speakers we have, but it turns out the kids love them and can query all sorts of information up that otherwise is tricky on a tablet or a computer if your typing skills are still developing. So while for an adult, streaming music while you cook via voice is 'nice' but hardly 'a big deal', it is pretty enabling for them. They especially like the one with a display, for the reasons you describe.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by jabuzz ( 182671 )

        I would imagine anyone who is suffering from sight loss. In the UK that's a market of two million people. In fact one of the TV adverts for Alex in the UK is of a blind woman using one. I would imagine they could be very helpful for people with mobility problems too.

        I got an Echo Dot with a smart plug a couple of years ago for a birthday present on Black Friday (neat that my birthday is at the end of November). Don't use the Echo very much, but the smart plug is very useful and I have several now. I mostly

    • Re:Nice company (Score:4, Funny)

      by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @11:14AM (#59592214)

      FTFS:

      The e-commerce titan announced Monday that there are now "hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices" in customers' hands worldwide, a massive increase from the 100 million it announced last January.

      It should read:

      The e-commerce titan announced Monday that there are now "hundreds of millions of customers" in Alexas' hands worldwide, a massive increase from the 100 million it announced last January.

      As in, "In Soviet Russia, Alexa owns YOU!"

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

      I have a bunch of nerdy friends -- the kind of people who put Smoothwall and DD-WRT on their devices, who run their own servers and don't use Facebook -- 2 work for security firms -- who bought Alexas over the holidays. :-( They proceeded to complain about surveillance, etc.

      Just like voting: complain all you want, it's your actions that matter.

      (Sorry guys! I might get flak if they read this.)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        Tell them that there is a button on top that they can use to turn off the microphone. They probably haven't read the instructions.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      I see that a lot from people who don't really know how the thing works. The system sits there passively listening for its wake up word, until it hears "Alexa" or "Computer" or "Echo" (whichever you've configured) it's not transmitting anything. After the wake up word it buffers your request and only then sends it to AWS for analysis. Unlike whatever that model of Samsung smart TV was it's not sending a stream of everything it hears back to the mother ship. Face it, your conversations just aren't that in

  • If you've bought into Alexa (or other home voice controllers), then you're going to buy multiple. I have one for every room of our house, and one in the car. It's easy to see how their sales have doubled. It's not like a personal device.

  • Command Parsing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lazarus ( 2879 ) on Monday January 06, 2020 @10:31AM (#59592070) Journal

    I'd like to meet the team that is responsible for the english language command parsing and responses. They've done the best job out of all of the "personal assistants". Of course it is not perfect, but Alex makes Siri look like an idiot. Most of the time you can throw some obscure question at Alexa and it comes up with something either interesting or useful.

    I think the next big advance in this is understanding context. I should be able to ask a follow-up question or clarify something.

    "Alexa what is the market capitalization of GE?"
    "The market capitalization of General Electric is ____"
    "And now many people work there?"
    "As of 2018 there were ____ people working at General Electric worldwide."

    Or something like:

    "Alexa, give me the current weather and then play the BBC World Service for 30 minutes."

    Doing this stuff is not a walk in the park and the team has done a great job so far. I'm looking forward to seeing what advances they make in the future.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

      With Google Assistant, I am so impressed that they can get the voice recognition nearly perfect, yet have such bad parsing. I have asinine conversations like:

      "Send message to Joe saying that the car needs gas"
      "Okay, sending message to Joe via SMS. What's the message?"
      "The car needs gas."
      "Okay, sending message -pause- The car needs gas -pause- Who would you like to send it to?" ... sometimes this cycle repeats until I give up...

      I say: "the test was today period he got a perfect score exclamation point"
      It t

      • Do you have your locale setup correctly? Maybe a brit programmed it and it doesn't understand that funny term you use to describe an "exclamation "mark"

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jabuzz ( 182671 )

        This is my biggest gripe. I would also add that you can't have a bunch of Alexa's and just say turn the lights off and it know which room you are in and turns the right ones off. Well when I last looked which admittedly was a couple of years ago now it's couldn't.

        • Sure you can. You can name lights, or put them in a group and say "Turn off the bedroom lights." If you put your echo into the same group, you can just say "Turn off the lights." Multiple echos and multiple groups work nicely this way.
          • I think jabuzz mnt that alexa shuld puck upmthe contect ie, oh Iâ(TM)ve been assigne tonthe same room as these lights, someoen says "turn lights off/on" without any more info, ok Iâ(TM)ll just turn of the lights in this room then. Ie use context thst has been provided up front, ofc this requiers the user to actually asign thing to rooms atbsetup and move them in the sw when they move them irl so.... yeah I see no problems here.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by jabuzz ( 182671 )

              Yes that is what I meant, and when I looked at it several years ago it was not possible, and after spending some time trying to make it work I just gave up and chalked it up to a limitation in the product. As I look now things have improved and it looks like it is possible.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        My wife has a strong (and quite lovely) Peruvian accent. It's amusing some of the Reminders that Alexa will create for her. Her main complaint is that there aren't enough names available for it. When I asked if she wanted to change the wake up word from 'Alexa' to 'Echo' or 'Computer' she asked, "Can I tell it 'Hey, bitch?'" Sorry love, that option's not available yet.

      • Yep, I have so many issues like this with google, that I'm baffled by how bad they can get it sometimes. Here was a few days ago:

        Me: set a reminder
        Google: what's the reminder?
        Me: Emily's house
        Google: Alright "house". When do you want to be reminded.

        OK, so maybe google didn't hear me say "Emily's". Except I tried changing the title multiple times, and each time it hears it as house. Plus I look in by assistant activity, and it even recorded that I said "Emily's house" and that it replied Alright "hous

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

          A+ for posting a screen shot of it. Now imagine if there was some kind of customer support where you could report the bug and they would fix it! Oh wait I forgot that Google's customers are advertisers, and only their customers get customer support.

    • I'm amazed as well. It recognizes my stammering 3 year old all the time perfectly.
  • I have zero interest in owning one. Maybe it has finally happened that as I cross 50 I age out of all of these newfangled gadgets I don't want in my home. Gonna suck when my dumb plasma finally dies and I'll be forced to either buy a smart TV or no TV at all. Or my next fridge will have to be "smart."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      Just don't connect them to the wireless. We have a nominally "smart" refrigerator, but since I don't see any utility in any of the features offered we've never set up connectivity. All of the "smart" televisions that I've seen still have jacks for cable and antenna, and most will still take a DVR/DVD player and a lot of them have an RJ-45 jack as well.

  • The only thing I've used mine for is name that tune game. Useless for tracking meals, recipes and groceries. The AI for all intents and purposes is a VOX Menu system of press 1 if you'd like ... press 2 if you'd like. Stupid and useless.

  • On second thought, those people who buy that stuff just want a slave, they've wanted one for eons and now Saint Bezos provideth.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      Don't knock it, Alexa is the only one in the house who actually does what I tell her to (most of the time).

  • I just wonder about actual usage. How many are gathering dust? for example, I upgraded my alexa dots to the show 5, so now I have three dots sitting in drawers.

    I wonder if they are counting the different amazon shopping and music apps, open them and you are able to use alexa on your smartphone.

    I wonder if they are counting the alexa win 10 app for computers. You can download it from the microsoft store.

    alexa is everywhere and hate to admit it, taken over my life. I even have alexa in the frames of my

    • We use them as a music device (and NPR). We use them over 24 hours per day, we have 4 of them. The kids get subjected to Mozart all night long, that's a lot of the hours.

      If I want a private conversation I go outside. The change of scenery is nice, even in winter (but not during the dead of summer).

      I didn't want any and got 4 a year ago Christmas and bowed to the power of a woman.

      Spent a bit of time working on a skill but it was convoluted and not clearly documented in my opinion (I wanted the David Pumpi

  • The devices are useful and provide good value for the money. They integrate nicely with the Ring Cameras and Alarm System. Amazon delivers quickly, and I can track my deliveries using these devices. I am more comfortable with Amazon as a vendor than Google, as Amazon is selling me a product where as, Google is selling ME AS A PRODUCT.

  • With the Amazon Show, they now see their devices double as well as hear them

  • Bad enough my flipping phone tracks as much as it does. On my laptop, not only is there a piece of tape over the mic & camera, both are DISABLED in the device manager. No way I would have one of these "always listening" speakers in my home, listening to God knows what all. "oh, but it's for your convenience" Yeah, right!

  • proving once again nobody cares about privacy.

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