Amazon’s Alexa Stalled with Users as Interest Faded, Documents Show (opens in new tab)

Anecdotally most of my friends just use it as a timer, and maybe a weather app or music player. There are a few automation nerds who wire their entire lives through it, but I find them to be the minority, even in the tech community. Just as many are suspicious of an Orwellian device that is actively listening.

These use cases remind me of the smart clocks of the early 2000s that were integrated clocks, thermostats, and barometers, and synced to the atomic clock in Colorado via radio. I wonder if there is a niche for a version of this you could talk to instead of a full Alexa. Calling home for voice processing makes sense when the tech is still rapidly evolving. But once its more mature, doing it all locally with a limited set of apps seems much more feasible.

People lose interest in Alexa for the same reason that most people don't spend their entire lives playing the same video game campaigns over and over again; the AI is compelling until you finish the game a few times, and then you figure out all their predictable patterns and discover all their limits. Once you figure out that Alexa is a dumb voice interface around a command line (without all the power of an actual command line), maybe you'll use it to play music or start a timer but the fantasies that it will be something you actively talk to in order to do everything in your home goes out the window. This is especially true after all the times it fails to understand what you say, fails to connect, or has issues because of AWS outages.

IMHO Alexa, Siri, and their ilk will only be useful when (guaranteed to be) fully local, and also able to understand and respond usefully to pretty much anything said to them, and apply common sense to ask clarifying questions and the like. We're at least two decades away from that, it seems.

a lot of people i know stopped using alexa out of privacy concerns. i wonder what percentage dropped off relating to privacy issues

We love our Alexa. He controls the lights, the thermostat, and provides for quick information. Based on my personal experience with family members , I suspect an issue most folks have is in not setting it up correctly.