It's highly unlikely that a typical end consumer will pay subscription fee just to have a conversation with a device. Not saying there won’t be niche domains where this is useful but it won't reach mass adoption to justify the costs to keep Alexa up and running. Maybe they can charge for LLM + Smart home features, perhaps there could be more takers?
Either way they need to figure it out soon because the cost will keep accumulating and they can write them off only for so many quarters.
It seems they had sold 500 million Alexa devices until last year [1]. Just the hardware infra to keep servicing them is massive; not to speak of developer cost.
I think people are getting a little weary with paying a company for physical hardware, paying a subscription fee for SAAS, paying with their private data being harvested and sold off to third parties and still getting served ads.
I wish people cared about this more. But from my own personal sampling of average non-tech people in my life, they kind of just accept it without flinching.
Drives me up the wall that people pay monthly for an otherwise static service just to keep the hardware functioning.
If amazon launched an LLM similar to chatgpt i guess I could pay for it and then access in alexa would be a bonus. That could make me choose amazon instead of openai, google etc.
I've only seen people use alexa to control the music player. Why do you thing they would be keen on paying for pro features while all they wanted since the very beginning was just not having to handle a remote or grab their phone to play music?
