The era of open voice assistants

It isn't even one year since the press stories about how dumb a product Alexa was and how it makes no money and all the devs are getting laid off. Something changed now?

Amazon lost 25 billion dollars on Alexa (between 2017 and 2021, from WSJ https://archive.is/uMTOB). Selling the hardware at a loss and I imagine a bigger portion was the thousands of people they had working in that division.

So yeah, Alexa is a dumb product... for Amazon. No one uses Alexa to buy anything from Amazon because the only way you can be sure of what you're ordering from Amazon is to be looking at the site. Otherwise you might get cat food from "JOYFUNG BEST Brand 2024" and not Purina.

Voice Assistants for Home Automation, like what Home Assistant is offering, are awesome. And this in particular is exciting exactly because of Alexa's failure as a product. Amazon clearly does not care about Alexa now, its been getting worse as they try to shoehorn in more and more monetization strategies.