Amazon is revamping its Alexa voice assistant as it prepares to launch a new paid subscription plan this year, according to internal documents and people familiar with the matter. But the change is causing internal conflict and may lead to further delay.

Pons_Aelius
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Giving something away for free then expecting to make people pay for it is always a winning strategy…

Avid Amoeba
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It works sometimes, when the thing is genuinely useful.

Pons_Aelius
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True but the problem is that they see 1,000,000s of people using the free version and think they are leaving money on the table by not charging and assume ~50% will happily pay for it when the conversion rate from free to paid is usually closer to 1% than it is to 50%.

@FoxBJK@midwest.social
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Or addictive. The first hit’s always free! Get people hooked on Alexa and then tell them it actually costs $10/month to turn your lights off

Dyskolos
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That’s why i stopped using those at all. It’s always the same.

But screw alexa. Why would i even want a bug sending my voice to some random server? And pay for it? Wouldn’t use that thing if they’d pay me…

ANON
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Oh you just remainded me bing does pay you for monitering your browsing activity

Dyskolos
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At least they don’t try to make you pay for that :-)

ANON
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Major w in today’s society 😂

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