Quotes a detailed report in Business Insider (paywall)
Great news
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Fwiw, I bet Amazon Music is not making a lot of money (basically that they can’t attribute much of the total Prime program’s stickiness/ lowered churn to the music offering). But I could be wrong.
Have been using Alexa voice controlled devices for about 4 years. The problem is when my Wife and I, especially the Wife is when we ask “Alexa” to perform a specific task “Lamp On” you get the response “I do not understand?” and that’s when the Wife goes into meltdown 
. I found the experience with Siri even more frustrating. I think the vast majority of people are not interested in this type technology, Do not know of any other family member who uses Alexa, Google or Siri voice activated devices.
The only real practical scenario to use voice activated services is motor vehicles, where safety is paramount and not having to fiddle about with knobs and switches whilst driving. Could also have benefits for the visually impaired etc.
Would I miss “Alexa” if it went away tomorrow?, NO it would just mean picking up the remote more often and getting out of my chair to physically turn a light on or off.
To be honest if I Pop my Clogs tomorrow 
the wife just would not be bothered to use “Alexa” 
.
There are feature requests for voice control of Roon. It would be cool if it could every work reliably but given the speech recognition issue combined with Roon’s poor search engine I can only foresee that a lot of swearing would be involved.
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I’m a relatively new Siri user, but “turn the lights on” = “sorry, I can’t do that” is the most frustrating thing ever. Plus, when the internet goes out, we have to sit in the dark 
A $2 switch always works, and it doesn’t listen.
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In the dark with no music either now… 
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We have a smart bulb in the Front Room. It was already on the other evening and the Wife said " Alexa, Front Room Up " Guess what?, It turned off. I never heard so many expletives and some I never heard before and made me blush at 70 years old 
.
I keep a bottle of single malt next to the candles, matches, torch and spare batteries in the under stairs cupboard for these occasions.
Note to self: add blanket and something like this:
Wind Up Radio, Hand Crank Solar Radio with Torch/Flashlight and Reading Lamp, 5000 mAh Portable AM/FM Radio with USB Phone Charger, Rechargeable Emergency Radio with SOS Alarm and Compass Amazon.co.uk
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We have an Alexa in our kitchen. It serves two purposes very well and one poorly but usefully).
1 “Alexa, set a ravioli timer for 9 minutes” (near 100% accuracy, incredibly useful to have hands free)
2. “Alexa, play NPR” (near 100% accuracy, puts Tune-In stream on kitchen Sonos)
3, “Alexa, tell me a joke” (100% terrible jokes, useful when young cousins are around)
These use cases alone are priceless. A hands free kitchen timer that allows many concurrent named timers is a game changer for those who like to cook.
I too hate Alexa for most complex tasks (though a neighbors elderly mother did get an ambulance after falling by asking Alexa). I think these things are in their infancy. Our kids will find voice assistants ubiquitous and useful. The telephone was once derided as a terrible gimmick that was unreliable and one which would never displace the letter and the visit.
Losing money doesn’t mean you made a mistake or that the product will never work. Many parts of Amazon lose $10b a year and that’s fine when AWS is kicking off profit like there’s no tomorrow. Our triumphalism over Bezos’ idiocy on this one will be short lived.
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Dare I try 
Alexa, get me a …
Interesting news. I can’t bring myself to like your post Anders because I am one of those seemingly rare people who really likes his voice assistant / smart speakers but I am grateful to you for posting this interesting news.
I’m really sad to hear of resources being pulled by both Amazon and Google because in my experience both Google Assistant and Alexa are not quite there yet and if this goes the way it looks as if it’s going then the deficiencies seem unlikely to get fixed.
I use both Nest and Echo smart speakers and despite the comments on this thread I find that my Echos (Alexa) do a better job of audio processing, i.e. they respond more reliably to the wake-up word and then correctly hear what I have said even in noisy environments and/or when I talk softly or mumble while at the same time they false-trigger less often than my Nest devices when the TV is on. I also like the fact that they can accomplish that better intended triggering with fewer false positives while having a more convenient single word activation (“Alexa”, “Computer” etc) rather than the to-me somewhat clunky “Hey Google” or “OK Google” for the Nest devices. Having said that, once the speaker gets to actually interpreting and acting on my voice commands I find the AI (natural language processing) of the Google devices to be far more sophisticated that that of Alexa so I usually get more satisfactory responses from my Nest devices.
I was really hoping that one day I could get at least the audio processing prowess of Amazon with the NLP prowess at least as good as Google’s but with these financial/resource issues it looks as if I might have to temper my expectations.
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Maybe Alexa only understands the Queen’s (or should it be King’s now) English
Confused by funny accents 
( said he from the North of England)
There is a price, your privacy. The problem isn’t the maturity or usefulness of features, the former would come and the latter is easy to imagine
100%. We struggled with this and twice have put “Hal” away. And both times the loss of the kitchen timer was too much for us so again out came the spy. We prioritized convenience, even though I’m probably on the somewhat more paranoid end about what could be captured and what it might be used for. My advice: if you value your privacy and you’ve never used a voice assistant as a kitchen timer, don’t start, because it’s so useful.
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I would in principle even be OK with it if it worked as advertised, i.e., it only activated when summoned, and only then uploaded my conversation to the cloud. But it doesn’t, and instead uploads random conversations …
Is that still the case? Amazon seems to be treating privacy issues with a lot more care these days.
Alexa always hears the wake word, but the problem is deciphering what is wanted, especially if there’s any background noise.
The software should be written so that once the wake word is heard, only the mikes with the strongest signal are left on, thereby eliminating any competition from ambient noises.
I have many Echo devices. They are good for turning things on/off, asking about the time/weather, timing things, asking some celebrity’s age, etc, i.e. simple, predictable things.
I’ve found that pitching my voice as low as possible helps.
There’s an excellent series on BBC Two (in collaboration with the Open University) at the moment: The Secret Genius of Modern Life. In it Professor Hannah Fry dissects (literally) an aspect of modern technology. Last week’s episode was devoted to the technology of virtual assistants and used Alexa as the example.
I have to admit that beforehand I would never countenance installing Alexa in our home, but I was sufficiently intrigued by how far the technology seems to have come with the 5th generation to toy with the idea of purchasing one for Christmas.
However, if Amazon decides that they can’t monetise Alexa in some fashion, and switch off the cloud service, then the echo dot is rendered useless. I’m surprised that they haven’t tied it to a subscription, e.g. Prime.
I’d be beyond shocked if support gets any worse. The pace of innovation may slow, but they had SO MANY ENGINEERS on the project that were making moonshot bets. Alexa isn’t going anywhere - I’d make a substantial bet on it. If you can’t justify a $25 purchase or $15 if you don’t mind old gen product which still works fine
(if you’re in the US, surely there’s similar prices in UK) to give it a try given very slim chance that the hardware becomes a brick, then you’re playing by different rules than I thought. Honestly, $15 for a kitchen timer that works without hands is absolute magic (as long as you’re willing to give up the privacy battle that @Suedkiez correctly points out is very real). If you want slightly better audio quality, then get a $50 bigger one, or go for the gusto and get a $70 unit with a screen that you can pull up recipes on etc. I’m not an Amazon shill. Hate the company’s effect on labor, destruction of downtowns (not that they began it), etc etc. But honestly, has transformed cooking for me, and friends who listen to audiobooks (I don’t) say it’s very transformational. If you have lightweight home automation (Sonos, smart switches, etc) I personally think it’s silly not to have one. I stop at the alarm clock one on my bedside table, but I’m cutting hairs finely on the privacy front.