The Sad Reality of Chatbotics

As I noted in my previous post on chatbotics Towards Chatbot Ethics (May 2019), the chatbot has sometimes been pitched as a kind of Holy Grail. Which prompts the question I discussed before - whom shall the chatbot serve?

Chatbots are designed to serve their master - and this is generally the organization that runs them, not necessarily the consumer, even if you have paid good money to have one of these curious cylinders in your home. For example, Amazon's Alexa is supposed to encourage consumers to access other Amazon services, including retail and entertainment -  and this is how Amazon expects to make a financial return on the sale and distribution of these devices.

But how well do they work even for them? The journalist Priya Anand (who tweets at @PriyasIdeas) has been following this question for a while. Back in 2018, she talked to digital marketing experts who warned that voice shopping was unlikely to take off quickly. Her latest article notes the attempts by Amazon Alexa to nudge consumers into shopping, which may simply cause some frustrated consumers to switch the thing off altogether. Does this explain the apparently high attrition rates?

If you are selling a device at a profit, it may not matter if people don't use it much. But if you are selling a device at an initial loss, expecting to recoup the money when the device is used, then you have to find ways of getting people to use the thing. 

Perhaps if Amazon can use its Machine Learning chops to guess what we want before we've even said anything, then the chatbots can cut out some of the annoying chatter. Apparently Alexa engineers think this would be more natural. Others might argue Natural's Not In It. (Coercion of the senses? We're not so gullible.)

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Priya Anand, The Reality Behind Voice Shopping Hype (The Information, 6 August 2018)

Priya Anand, Amazon’s Alexa Stalled With Users as Interest Faded, Documents Show (Bloomberg, 22 December 2021)

Daphne Leprince-Ringuet, Alexa can now guess what you want before you even ask for it (ZDNet, 13 November 2020)

Tom McKay, Report: Almost Nobody Is Using Amazon's Alexa to Actually Buy Stuff (Gizmodo, 6 August 2018)

Chris Matyszczyk, Amazon wants you to keep quiet, for a brilliantly sinister reason (ZDNet, 4 November 2021)

Related posts: Towards Chatbot Ethics (May 2019), Technology and the Discreet Cough (September 2019), Chatbiotics: Coercion of the Senses (April 2023)

Andy Jassy

Most people still think of Amazon primarily as an online retailer, but the elevation of Andy Jassy to take over from Jeff Bezos as CEO provides further evidence for the strategic importance of Amazon Web Services (AWS) within the Amazon group.

AWS was launched in 2002 and relaunched in 2006. In March 2008, Om Malik published an interview with Ray Ozzie, then the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, which included some positive comments about AWS. By the end of the year, both Google and Microsoft had announced rival cloud computing offerings. As far as I can see, cloud computing first appeared as an Emerging Technology on the Gartner Hype Curve (it's not a cycle) in 2008, reaching the Peak of Inflated Expectations by 2009.

During that period, I was a software industry analyst, calling out Jeff Bezos and Ray Ozzie as two of the most visionary players in the industry. My colleague Lawrence Wilkes wrote a long report on AWS in 2004. (But the hype around cloud computing took off later, and the broader awareness of AWS is comparatively recent, so I'm not convinced that the classic hype curve applies to this topic.)

Alongside the news of Jassy's elevation, today's tech press also reports that Google Cloud is still making massive losses. So much for the Slope of Enlightenment then.

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Jasper Jolly, Bezos leaves Amazon in its prime – keeping it that way is the task (The Guardian, 3 February 2021)

Kieren McCarthy, So Jeff Bezos is stepping back from Amazon to play with his space rockets. Who's this Andy Jassy chap? (The Register, 3 February 2021)

Om Malik, GigaOM Interview: Ray Ozzie (GigaOM, 10 March 2008)

Ron Miller, What Andy Jassy’s promotion to Amazon CEO could mean for AWS (TechCrunch, 2 February 2021)

Simon Sharwood, Google's cloud services lost $14.6bn over three years – and CEO Sundar Pichai likes that trajectory (The Register, 3 February 2021)

Lawrence Wilkes, Amazon and eBay Web Services - The new enterprise applications? (CBDI Journal, October 2004) 

Related posts: Jeff Bezos and Ecosystem Thinking (February 2004), Amazon and eBay (August 2004), Internet Service Disruption (November 2005), Ray Ozzie (March 2008), Utility Computing and Profitability (March 2008)

Also Technology Hype Curve (September 2005)