Fixing Alexa

The news has it that Amazon is laying off “thousands” of workers, many of them in the Alexa group.

That’s too bad, but probably not surprising. As an outsider, I view Alexa as a technology with an identity crisis — it tries to do many, many things and does none of them particularly well.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Alexa — I have an Alexa Show in (almost) every room in the house. But as useful and (occasionally) fun as it is, it can also be incredibly annoying.

Here’s my recipe for fixing it:

1. Forget about Alexa “helping” Amazon. I won’t ever buy anything through Alexa. Forget it. Alexa is not a supporting character in the Amazon universe: it’s not a new “channel”; it’s a star in its own right. Stop advertising.
   
2. Forget about “monetizing” Alexa. Forget it! Stop wasting time and build stuff I’ll get a kick out of. Make your money from the sale of the devices.
   
3. Embrace what Alexa is used for. All of our Alexa Shows are primarily used as digital picture frames connected to Amazon Photos. Yeah, and the weather screen is helpful too. Oh, yeah, the timer app is helpful in the kitchen.
   
4. Embrace what Alexa could be used for. The most exciting use case for Alexa is driving home automation. Make it work seamlessly with Blink and all the other gadgets (and, by the way, how about some really high-end home security products? 24×7 video monitoring, etc.). Build in all the home automation protocols — Zigbee, etc. Interoperate with Apple and Google devices — be the first!
   
5. Give me management. I have a fleet of Alexas — I want to manage them all from one place (preferably my PC where I have lots of real estate, and absolutely positively NOT my phone where I can barely read the Alexa app’s tiny font!). I want to be able to set preferences and settings for all the Alexas in my home at a stroke. While you’re at it, give us an API that can be used for more than just skills development.
   
6. Stop being annoying. Stop showing me yesterday’s news. Stop asking me if I have the flu.
   
7. While you’re at it, fix the Photos app. It’s really terrible — it’s slow, it has memory leaks, and does stupid stuff (like it uploads HEICs but you can’t see them on the web or on Alexa). There’s a real opportunity for a great cloud photos app which Alexa could leverage: do it!
   

That’s for starters. I have a few thousand other ideas but the main thing here is focus. Alexa should be about usefulness in the home, not about selling me more stuff or advancing the Amazon brand.