Why Amazon Isn’t Making Money Off Alexa

WSJ Tech News Briefing

The Wall Street Journal

News, Tech News

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 24 July 2024

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Amazon sells its Echo smart speakers and other devices at low prices, expecting them to generate income for other parts of the company once they are in people's homes. It hasn’t worked out. WSJ reporter Dana Mattioli tells host Zoe Thomas why. Plus, to bring 11,000 college football players to digital life in just three months, Electronic Arts turned to artificial intelligence. Sign up for the WSJ's free Technology newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Claude by Anthropic is generative AI for everyone.
0:03.5	Claude 3.5 sonnet offers groundbreaking intelligence at a price point that works for heavy duty tasks.
0:09.5	Join thousands of enterprises using Anthropic to stay at the frontier of AI.
0:15.0	Learn more at Anthropic.com slash Claude.
0:19.0	Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Wednesday, July 24th. I'm Zoe Thomas for the Wall Street Journal.
0:28.0	After securing college players likeness rights for the first time,
0:32.8	electronic arts brought 11,000 players and 134 stadiums
0:37.8	to digital life in just three months
0:40.7	with the use of new tech.
0:42.3	We'll explain. And then, Amazon's echo devices brought its
0:46.6	Alexa voice assistant into millions of homes. But it hasn't generated a lot of revenue for the company.
0:52.9	In fact, Amazon has lost tens of billions of dollars on its devices business as a whole.
0:58.6	W.S.J. reporter Dana Matioli is going to join us to discuss the obscure accounting metric that led to this.
1:10.8	But first, Electronic Arts, or EA, released a new college video game last week, and for the first time it includes replicas of real players.
1:20.0	To create these likenesses, the video game maker relied on artificial intelligence technology.
1:25.4	Here to tell us more is our reporter Sarah Needleman.
1:28.4	So Sarah, this wasn't generative AI like Dolly or Stapel Diffusion.
1:34.0	How did this technology work?
1:35.8	Sure, what it basically did is it took photographs
1:38.3	that were submitted to EA from the player's schools
1:42.4	and automatically turned them into 3D characters that were pretty close
1:47.2	to exactly what they wanted.
	...

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