this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
158 points (98.2% liked)

Technology

59675 readers
3246 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
158
Amazon lays off Alexa employees as 2010s voice-assistant boom gives way to AI (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
30 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Amazon is going through yet another round of layoffs, reports Computerworld, and once again the company’s devices-and-services division appears to be bearing the brunt of it.

The layoffs will primarily affect the team working on Alexa, the Amazon voice assistant that drives the company's Echo smart speakers and other products.

"Several hundred roles are impacted," the company said in a statement, "a relatively small percentage of the total number of people in the Devices business who are building great experiences for our customers."

Amazon hasn't released an AI-powered version of Alexa yet, but it showed "an early preview" of its efforts in September, "based on a new large language model that's been custom-built and specifically optimized for voice interactions."

But the hardware is sold at cost, and people interact with Alexa mainly to play music or check the weather, not to spend money on Amazon or anywhere else.

It has been a tough year for Amazon's devices division, which has already borne a large share of the 27,000 layoffs that the company has announced in the last 12 months.

The original article contains 460 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 61%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!