Amazon is selling the devices at or below cost and hoping that Alexa will make the money (which it doesn’t)
Look at all those Korean novelas and shovelware on Netflix. There are cohorts of subscribers who remain highly loyal because they're into it. Netflix isn't necessarily swinging for the fences with high brow, popular content that competes with the best studios in the world. Instead, they pump out a wide variety of content that keeps the maximum number of people subscribed.
Apple is similar. They promote features - whether it's Siri, health, privacy, family sharing/controls, etc. - that will strongly appeal to some cohort and keep them on the platform. Then, they incrementally hook you into services until you're buying $1000 devices for the whole family and paying $30/mo for the services bundle. And once you're there, they have you because the switching cost involves turning your digital life upside down.
I'm sure enough people find some small use for the voice commands that it's a good feature to have on the phones.
Apple isn't trying to make money with Siri. It's using Siri to make its ecosystem of Apple Music and similar more valuable to its customers.
The limits that Apple puts on what it can do makes that cloud side computation less expensive.
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Consider that bit - less expensive. Apple doesn't run its own cloud in the way that Google, Amazon, or Microsoft do. So what does Alexa cost? It costs for AWS cloud time. That's the expense that it's running. Those skills that people use run on AWS compute time rather than a phone's local cpu and battery.
A google search "costs" about 1 KJ of energy. Alexa has similar costs somewhere just for energy and other costs for the maintenance of the additional software and content. It costs something to maintain that joke database.
I can't even say "Turn on the lights and the fan". I have to present it all in bite-sized chunks. Come on how hard is that.
I have a feeling there is no AI in these supposedly intelligent assistants. Only scripted stuff.
It's not "Siri is smarter" but rather "Apple is working on minimizing cloud costs because it is entirely a cost for them."
Siri is scripted and limited to make it locally "smarter".
With Amazon and Alexa, everything goes to AWS because that's where the entirety of Alexa's processing happens. The hardware devices in the homes are "dumb" terminals for AWS with a voice interface. This allows Amazon to make use of AWS as much as it can and do something with "surplus" computing power that it has available on AWS.
“What’s it like outside right now?” => GetWeatherIntent arguments=[time=current location=device_location]
There’s no Omni intelligent being making API calls anywhere. It’s NLU with a decision tree(s) based on the intent and arguments
