Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year
Having worked at startups that wanted to take Alexa into the enterprise space, I&#x27;ll say that Amazon has been absolutely opposed to the idea, which feels like a missed opportunity.<p>Up to a point, I can admire the product discipline that Amazon and Apple (Alexa and Siri) have shown in keeping their voice products focused on consumers. But after so many years, when do we finally get voice for the enterprise? At one time, I was very hopeful about this space, see: &quot;I believe in Enterprise software for the Amazon Echo&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smashcompany.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;i-believe-in-enterprise-software-for-the-amazon-echo" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smashcompany.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;i-believe-in-enterprise...</a><p>In late 2015 and early 2016 this space, of voice tools, was moving quickly and I thought that surely, within a year, we would see better support for enterprise applications. I was mistaken.<p>Here is an example of the excitement of those times: &quot;Invoxia will allow Alexa to figure out who is speaking&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smashcompany.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;invoxia-will-allow-alexa-to-figure-out-who-is-speaking" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smashcompany.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;invoxia-will-allow-al...</a><p>At that time, it felt like we were on the cusp of using voice tools in business. There was certainly a market. For instance, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jwt.com&#x2F;history&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jwt.com&#x2F;history&#x2F;</a> has about 9,000 employees in at least a dozen countries. They reached out to me to talk about their &quot;Pangea&quot; project, which was a huge internal project to better map what teams and skills and resources they had internally. I had a meeting with them in the summer of 2016 and they asked &quot;We are thinking we could put an Amazon Alexa in every meeting room, and then whenever we need someone with a specific skill, we could ask, hey, Alexa, do we have someone at this company who has this skill?&quot;<p>At that time, I told them of some of the difficulties, but I was also hopeful that things would change a lot of over the next year. I was wrong.<p>Among the many, many problems we faced was simply getting Alexa to recognize the names of companies, when the sound of the name did not match a standard English spelling:<p>TATCHA<p>L’Oréal<p>L’OCCITANE<p>What was needed was a way train specific conversions of phonemes to text, for both Alexa and Siri. There are a small number of tricks that are available, such as programming a glottal stop:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smashcompany.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;using-a-glottal-stop-to-force-the-amazon-echo-to-correctly-pronounce-tw" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smashcompany.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;using-a-glottal-stop-...</a><p>However, in general, neither Amazon nor Apple wants to give us the tools we need, and there has been little progress in recent years.<p>I know that many people on Hacker News have read my book &quot;How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps&quot; in which we were using NLP technologies to try to allow salespeople to send text messages to Salesforce:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0998997617?psc=1&amp;ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0998997617?psc=1&amp;ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_...</a><p>As you can imagine, we hoped to move on to voice-to-text so that salespeople could simply talk to Salesforce.<p>It seems to me there is a wave of new startups that are waiting to move forward in this area, but no small startup has the resources to build a voice-to-text system from scratch. We need the larger firms to help set up the ecosystem, so that we can move forward in this area.<p>Where is the company that is going to give us the tools we need to start building great voice driven enterprise solutions?