In 2014, Amazon’s revenue was a mere $88 billion, compared to last year’s $604 billion, and Jeff Bezos announced his vision for a Star Trek-style talking computer that knows the answer to everything and can help with (unspecified) tasks. Not only did it speak in a fairly natural voice but it understood what you said, almost instantly.
The big barrier with tech of all types has always been the ‘man-machine interface’. How can the machine understand what I want it to do? Before Alexa the main answer was the dreaded keyboard. Designed in the 1860s, the typewriter keyboard isn’t intuitive to anyone but a trained typist and is also very slow: hardly fit for purpose in the 21st century.
And there is definitely intelligence going on. You can ask the same question countless ways and still receive a sensible reply. It really does understand what you’re asking (usually), and then does things in response. This has enabled us to put Alexa devices at the heart of our smart home. We now have nine Alexa devices dotted around the house, providing an easy interface between us humans and our smart gadgets. ‘Alexa, start the dishwasher.’
But Alexa’s future always hangs in the balance. It has never made a profit for Amazon: between 2017 and 2021 Amazon lost more than $25 billion in this part of its business. The dream that it would encourage and help us to buy more things from Amazon hasn't really materialised.
It seems there are some things where you can't beat a screen and keyboard after all, and shopping on Amazon is one of them.