Why Amazon is disappointed with Alexa

Last week, Amazon revealed that people are not forming a bond with its home voice assistant, Amazon Echo, better known as Alexa: the vast majority of us use it mainly for playing music, and little else.

The problem is that Amazon has staked a lot on a market it began to develop long before the rest of the Big Tech companies, which it has dominated, and to which it allocates no less than 10,000 people and anual fixed costs estimated at $4.2 billion.

Around 25% of all American households have at least one Amazon Echo device… but in practice, they use it almost exclusively to set a timer when they are cooking or selecting something to listen to. None of those activities bring Amazon any profit, not even music, since most users tend to connect that function not with the company’s service, Amazon Music, but with its competitor, Europe’s Spotify.

What do you do with a device in a category that you have created yourself, and that as well as costing you a ton of money and resources, generates nothing for you? When Alexa tries to “be helpful” and encourage the user to buy something on Amazon, it is usually met with rejection or indifference.

Years ago, the company created buttons associated with certain products. It was a winner: users could put the washing machine soap button on the washing machine, or the loo…