This Christmas, as in previous years, many Amazon devices with its voice assistant, Alexa, will become the new gadgets that will populate living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, offices, etc. And it is that the relationship between the adjusted price of the same and the enormous amount of functions that offer lmakes you a great gift option, either to other people or also to oneself, which are also good dates to have a detail with ourselves.
Be that as it may, heThe first days with a device with a voice assistant are usually of intensive use of the same– We explore all its possibilities, we search the internet for curious and funny voice commands, we try to carry on a conversation (only to find that the assistants do not have that capacity) and, in short, we make Alexa, Siri, the voice assistant of Google or anyone else earns their pay during that period of heavy use.
However, it seems that this first interest tends to decline rapidly, or so we can conclude from the research published by Bloomberg, which states that there have been years in which between 15% and 25% of new Alexa users were no longer using the voice assistant in their second week with the device. An exceptionally ephemeral use that, as revealed in said publication, is quite worrying in the offices of Amazon.
There are plenty doubts about the reasons that cause this wear so fast in the interest of Alexa, so we can read various theories that try to explain it. Most likely, rather than blaming one of them, the problem is different in each case, and that therefore we find ourselves in a mix of all of them, in which each case will take a little more of one or the other. .
The first reason is undoubtedly privacy. Although Amazon actively and passively states that Alexa is a privacy-friendly service, the general belief is that this is not the case, and that the device, in fact, remains constantly listening and processing what is happening around it.
Another reason commonly argued has to do with the fact that, for these users, finally the Alexa functions end up being less practical than they initially thought. This, of course, has to do very directly with the integration of the services accessible from the device that we use in our day to day. If there is not enough coincidence in this sense, the assistant will lose an important part of its usefulness and, therefore, it will surely be relegated to a marginal use
And there is also a third theory, although I agree less with it, which states that the time for voice assistants like Alexa has not yet come, that there is still time until the population integrates voice assistants as something common in their lives, something that will surely come from the hand of a greater digitization of homes, cars, etc.
Be that as it may, the internal Amazon documentation to which Bloomberg has had access states that the company is concerned about this point and, for some time now, they have been working on the search for these reasons and, above all, how to ensure that user interest in Alexa does not decline so quickly. And it is that what does make sense is to think that if that initial interest is prolonged for longer, those users will later be less likely to stop using it.
An important point, that is, the Bloomberg publication is based on Alexa documentation, but it would not surprise me if the figures for other voice assistants are similar. Do you regularly use a voice assistant?
