this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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Amazon lays off Alexa employees as 2010s voice-assistant boom gives way to AI (arstechnica.com)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months 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.

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