There was a time when it thought that Alexa would yield a robust ecosystem of apps, or Alexa Skills, that would make the voice assistant an integral part of users’ lives. Amazon envisioned tens of thousands of software developers building valued abilities for Alexa that would grow the voice assistant’s popularity—and help Amazon make some money.
But about seven years after launching a rewards program to encourage developers to build Skills, Alexa’s most preferred abilities are the basic ones, like checking the weather. And on June 30, Amazon will stop giving out the monthly Amazon Web Services credits that have made it free for third-party developers to build and host Alexa Skills. The company also recently told devs that its Alexa Developer Rewards program was ending, virtually disincentivizing third-party devs to build for Alexa.
↫ Scharon Harding at Ars Technica
I’ve never used Alexa – Amazon doesn’t really have a footprint in either The Netherlands or Sweden, so I never really had to care – but I always thought the Skills were the reason it was so loved. It seemingly makes no sense to me to start killing off this feature, but then, I’m assuming Amazon has the data to back up the fact people aren’t using them.
It sucks, I guess? Can someone who uses Alexa fill in the blanks for me here?
No. No one uses skills really. Family and friends use Alexa/echo for only a couple of things
Current temp/weather.
Wifi Extender
Set timer
Play music/podcast
They’re usually set up in kitchens.
I’m guessing that’s the extent of use for at least 80% of people. Half the battle is disabling functionality they try pushing, like amazon package delivery updates, new songs from artists accidently followed.
I bought an Alexa for my mother, with two use cases in mind:
– Turn on the light
– Call me
It works quite well for the first one. Getting Alexa to place a phone call, however, is quite frustrating. Fortunately we have never had to use it in a case of emergency.
The good thing is that my children have fun playing with Alexa, proving over and over how un-intelligent it is.
I use Alexa to control my smart home. Very robust and solid, and everything is integrated. I have lights (Lutron), shades (Lutron), cameras, alarm, vacuums (iRobot), washing machine, dryer, Sonos, music, fans, etc. Everyone is integrated with Alexa. If I had to guess, they are having newer integrations go through Matter, so custom integrations are no longer needed.
Skills are Alexa apps and integrations. You control things like Home Assistant, Sonos or adding things into shopping lists with Todoist via Alexa skills. I hope it doesn’t outright kill those as we use them dozens time a day.
My Alexa form a kind of central function in my family. Setting timers.
When I cook it set timer after timer in between the music/podcasts. But honestly, even the skills I Do use are little more than light on/off or “play sleep sounds”.
It definitely feels a use case in my family, but the apps don’t honestly form part of that. I have noticed the services getting progressively worse over the last 6 months or so. I assumed they were going to launch an “AI enhanced” paid subscription service soon..
We use it mainly to control our lights and vacuum and to answer the odd question without having to google it.
However, the current generation of assistants feel really old, clunky and limited after things like chatgpt came out.
Just for controlling the lights, when it hears wrong, it will often unhelpfully tell you that “multiple lights match the name X”, where 99% of the time, it should have picked the room that matched what it heard the best. You can get it to turn on multiple rooms with one command – sometimes, but i would much rather it could understand more natural language, like “turn on X, Y and Z, on, and make them a dimmed warm white, oh, except Y”
And better yet, it should be stateful, so when you ask it to do something, you can ask it to undo the change. About once a month one of us manage to ask it to do something, which results in it turning on all lights in the house and set it to the same setting. It only takes a minute to fix through the Hue app, but it is quite annoying.