Amazon tries to make its most annoying service less terrible
The challenge for the retail giant is getting customers to use something many have mostly ignored.
My Amazon Echo works well as a speaker to play music and podcasts while I'm cooking.
It also gets heavy use as a timer while I'm making dinner. Alexa, the digital assistant inside the Echo, can theoretically do more than serve as a stopwatch or countdown clock for me, but that's the only consistent use I've ever had for it.
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That's the problem Amazon (AMZN) and CEO Andy Jassy have with Alexa; it's a product many consumers have tried and not many have found overly useful.
The digital assistant isn't that great at playing the song I'm asking for, so I'm not confident it will be great at organizing my day. It can tell me the weather, maybe give me a sports score, but I rarely use it for any of those things.
It does politely greet me if I mention my sister-in-law Alexis, and it sometimes makes noise for no reason.
Amazon and Jassy, if they want to save Alexa, they have to fully change consumer behaviour around the device. It may not be a Clippy-level failure, but it's a failure, and Clippy was at least cute.
Now, the company is back with a revised Alexa, and Jassy seems pretty excited that it can go from annoying novelty (my words) to useful AI-driven personal assistant (a paraphrase of his words).
"I want to briefly mention a few other items. As I've referenced a couple of times, in Q1, we introduced Alexa+. Our next-generation of Alexa personal assistant was meaningfully smarter and more capable than our prior self, can both answer virtually any question and take actions, and is free with Prime or available to non-Prime customers for $99 a month," CEO Andy Jassy said during Amazon's first-quarter earnings call.
