Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizen OC_Formula for the clue delivery! CTOnews.com, Nov. 22 (Xinhua) Amazon is currently experiencing the biggest layoffs in its history, with plans to cut about 10, 000 jobs. According to Business Insider, one of the departments hardest hit by the layoffs is Amazon's Alexa voice assistant division, which is clearly out of favor.

Alexa Voice Assistant has been around for 10 years and its features have been plagiarized by Google and Apple. However, Alexa never managed to create a sustainable source of income, so Alexa didn't really make money. Alexa, which, along with Amazon Prime Video, is part of Amazon's "global digital" division, said it lost $3 billion in the first quarter of 2022, with "the vast majority" of the losses attributed to Alexa, twice as much as other divisions, and the hardware division will lose $10 billion this year, the report said.

Business Insider interviewed "more than a dozen current and former employees of the company's hardware team" who described "a department in crisis". Almost all plans to make Alexa profitable have failed, with one former employee calling Alexa a "huge failure of imagination" and a "wasted opportunity", and this month's layoffs are the end result of years of trying to turn things around.

Although Alexa's Echo series is "one of the best-selling products on Amazon, most of the devices are sold at cost," the report said. An internal document describes the business model as: "We want to make money when people use our equipment, not when they buy our equipment." However, this plan has never really come true.

Amazon wants people to buy more things on Amazon through voice assistants, but the reality is that not many people are willing to spend money or buy goods without seeing pictures or reading comments. Alexa receives 1 billion interactions a week, but most conversations are just trivial instructions to play music or ask about the weather, which are unprofitable, the report said.

In an open letter to employees, Amazon CEO Jassy said it remained "committed" to Alexa (after significant layoffs on the Alexa team). One employee revealed that there were "no clear instructions for equipment" and that because the hardware was not profitable, there were no clear incentives to continue to launch popular products.

CTOnews.com learned that data show that Alexa ranks third in the voice assistant battle in the United States, with 81.5 million Google Assistant users, 77.6 million Apple's Siri and 71.6 million Alexa.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.