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Amazon CEO Wants To Put Ads In Your Alexa+ Conversations (techcrunch.com) 48

Posted by BeauHD from the if-there's-money-to-be-made dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sees an opportunity to deliver ads to users during their conversations with the company's AI-powered digital assistant, Alexa+, he said during Amazon's second-quarter earnings call Thursday. "People are excited about the devices that they can buy from us that has Alexa+ enabled in it. People do a lot of shopping [with Alexa+]; it's a delightful shopping experience that will keep getting better," said Jassy on the call with investors and Wall Street analysts. "I think over time, there will be opportunities, as people are engaging in more multi-turn conversations, to have advertising play a role to help people find discovery, and also as a lever to drive revenue."

[...] Amazon has made Alexa+ free for Prime customers (who pay $14.99 a month) and added a $20-a-month subscription tier for Alexa+ on its own. Jassy suggested on Thursday that Alexa+ could eventually include subscription tiers beyond what's available today -- perhaps an ad-free tier. Up until now, ads have only appeared in Alexa in limited ways. Users may occasionally see a visual ad on Amazon's smart display device, the Echo Show, or hear a pre-recorded ad in between songs on one of Alexa's smart speakers. But Jassy's description of an AI-generated ad that Alexa+ delivers in a multistep conversation, which could help users find new products, is uncharted territory for Amazon and the broader tech industry. Marketers have expressed interest in advertising in AI chatbots, and specifically Alexa+, but exactly how remains unclear. [...] Jassy is betting that users will talk to Alexa+ more than Alexa, which could drive more advertising and more shopping on Amazon.com. However, early reviews of Alexa+ have been mixed. Amazon has reportedly struggled to ship some of Alexa+'s more complicated features, and the rollout has been slower than many expected.

There's a lot to figure out before Amazon puts ads in Alexa+. Like most AI models, Alexa+ is not immune to hallucinations. Before advertisers agree to make Alexa+ a spokesperson for their products, Amazon may have to come up with some ways to ensure that its AI will not offer false advertising for a product. Jassy seems enthusiastic about making advertising a larger part of Amazon business. Amazon's advertising revenue went up 22% in the second quarter, compared to the same period last year. Delivering ads in AI chatbot conversations may also raise privacy concerns. People tend to talk more with AI chatbots compared to deterministic assistants, like the traditional Alexa and Siri products. As a result, generative AI chatbots tend to collect more information on users. Some users might be unsettled by having that information sold to advertisers and having ads appear in their natural language conversations with AI.

Amazon CEO Wants To Put Ads In Your Alexa+ Conversations More | Reply

Amazon CEO Wants To Put Ads In Your Alexa+ Conversations

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  • I don't understand: people are paying to be spied on? Really?
    Now, people will be paying for advertisements??
    Honestly, I don't understand. I thought having to put up with adverts was the price people paid for getting cheap stuff.

    • Amazon's quest to monetize every facet of your existence is unending apparently.

    • Do you have cable TV? If so, you are paying for ads

    • ...people are paying to be spied on? Really?

      We've all been paying to be spied on ever since the availability of remote communication. Morse code transmissions were monitored by the Government, and it's only gotten worse since then. The cells phones we all carry are routinely spied on. Our landlines were always subject to secretive government taps, etc.

      However, none of those things had ads interjected into them. Invasive ads are a scourge on humanity that has never been seen before the common age.

  • Reading TFS make me even happier I don't have any Alexa (or other similar) devices - and never will.

    The sole exception is my Pixel 5a, but Google Assistant is specifically not enabled and Gemini isn't installed (or selected as the Assistant) -- this sort of thing seems fairly unavoidable with smartphones now, but, thankfully, they can be disabled, for now anyway..

  • I don't have Alexa+ conversations.

    So good luck with that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rossdee ( 243626 )

      Me Too

      I have never enabled Alexa on any of my Fire devices.

      • I have ZERO social media on my phones, and ZERO stores like Amazon , AliExpress, ZERO streaming junk like Netflix, Disney etc on it too.
        I have made ZERO purchases online with my phone.

        • Sounds like your device has ZERO utility for most people.

          • I use it all the time. It does exactly what I need it to do.

            What it is NOT doing is being used as an advertising device, a data collection device, a tracking device for companies to use free of charge.

            You want your phone to be effectively an ankle bracelet so people/companies can track your movements, send you adverts, etc, then go for it.

            • I use it all the time. It does exactly what I need it to do.

              Well, I have no doubt that you use your device for the limited uses that you use it for.

  • This is Ricardoâs theory of rent (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Friday August 01, 2025 @06:40PM (#65561360) Homepage Journal

    In case you never took that course, the classical economist David Ricardo figured out that if you were a tenant farmer choosing between two lots of land, the difference in the productivity of the lands makes no difference to you. Thatâ(TM)s because if a piece of land yielded, say, ten thousand dollars more revenue per year, the landlord would simply be able to charge ten thousand more in rent. In essence landlords can demand all these economic advantages their land offers to the tenant.

    All these tech companies are fighting to create platforms which you, in essence, rent from them. Why do you want to use these platforms? Because they promise convenience, to save you time. Why do the tech companies want to be in the business of renting platforms deeply embedded in peopleâ(TM)s lives? Because they see the time theyâ(TM)re supposedly saving you as theirs, not yours.

    Sure, the technology *could* save you time, thatâ(TM)s what youâ(TM)d want it for, but the technology companies will inevitably enshittify their service to point itâ(TM)s barely worth using, or even beyond that if they can make it hard enough for customers to extract themselves.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ukoda ( 537183 )

      Sure, the technology *could* save you time, thatâ(TM)s what youâ(TM)d want it for, but the technology companies will inevitably enshittify their service to point itâ(TM)s barely worth using, or even beyond that if they can make it hard enough for customers to extract themselves.

      I guess lock in is the key because without it the more they enshittify the more customers they loose. While you could say enshittify feature will earn X dollars but lose Y dollars lost from customers who stop using the service, then surely at some point Y will exceed X making enshittification a money loser. Yet the enshittification continues.

      I have binned my FireTVs, stopped using Android on my TVs and my Google Chrome Casts are close to reaching their enshittification limit with their recent changes.

  • Your Alexa devices will all come with ads, and you will will have to pay to use your device without advertising....

  • Really stupid! I use Alexa for music and radio playback, as a timer, and to control my power sockets. In recent months, Bluetooth has gotten worse, so my expensive Bose headphones only connect sporadically. As soon as the first ad runs on my devices, all Echo devices will end up in the junk box in the basement. There are other good devices.

  • People already quit using Alexa because of ads (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Friday August 01, 2025 @07:32PM (#65561414) Homepage

    It's become little more than an electronic salesperson in your home. Who wants that?

    Everybody I know, who had an Alexa device, has gotten rid of it or sold it or thrown it away.

  • Amazon CEO Wants To Put Ads In Your Alexa+ Conversations

    If it's a free to use product the they can knock themselves out, they have to fund it somehow. If it's on a product I paid good money for they can expect two things (1) a class action lawsuit, (2) a whole lot of people will never buy another Amazon product again.

  • Amazon has admitted numerous times to their investors that they'd had a very hard time monetizing Alexa, which is running at a loss because the vast majority of users use them to control lights and music, but NEVER buy a single thing through it despite Amazon's more and more desperate attempts to shoehorn purchases in there.

    Forcing ads down the throats of paying customers is not going to magically make them more likely to suddenly start buying things, it just means they'll start looking at alternative sma

  • Not that you should trust these things in the first place, but that's a surefire way to erode trust in these things.

  • Let people pay to use it...get hooked on it. Then inject ads, but wait! We'll keep the ads out with a "premium" subscription.
  • The enshittification is real. Papa Jeff needs money so he can give it back to Daddy Tramp in the form of Melania fockumentaries. Barf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
  • YOU Pay for the service AND Still Get ads? WTH is wrong with these companies? Trying to bleed you out of everything. I envy the Amish they don't have to deal with this.

  • if you don't like the ads. You can consume Amazon services (prime/video/music) without an echo device.

    If you're using it for "smart home" type of things, look into home assistant instead:

    https://www.home-assistant.io/ [home-assistant.io]

    You can run that on a raspberry pi and keep your data private and local. It works great!

    Best,

  • love it. Consumers are now so dumb you can get them to "subscribe" for any shit and any enshittification.

  • Ad based electronic ecosystems will never work as long as Apple is out there, they are just going to slowly kill themselves.

    Apple can move downwards in price much easier than some ad encrusted shitshow can move up.

  • They already record all of your conversations and store them. Now they want to play ads. I wish people would be more vocal about ads and these companies would be not reluctant to push them into every corner of our lives.

  • "People are excited about the devices that they can buy from us that has Alexa+ enabled in it. People do a lot of shopping [with Alexa+]; it's a delightful shopping experience that will keep getting better,"

    Please, name one person who's not being paid by Amazon who says anything like this. And if you manage to dig up one person who says it, go ahead and ask them if paid advertising in the stream continues to delight them.

  • in regularly making me never regret not buying such a device. And no, you can't activate my phone by shouting 'Hey, Siri!' at it, as a friend of mine tried to do a few years ago. And he now has an iPhone.

    A friend of mine was woken very late one night by his wife. She told him that she heard someone in their basement. He listened, and indeed he heard the faint sounds of talking, but couldn't make out what was being said. He grabbed a baseball bat kept in their bedroom for such a purpose and quietly m

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