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

CTOnews.com, Nov. 22 (Xinhua)-- Amazon recently launched a new round of layoffs for the company's equipment and services division, mainly affecting the Alexa intelligent assistant team.

"while hundreds of employees will be affected, layoffs are still relatively small given the total number of people in the equipment business," Amazon said. "

Amazon has struggled to make money from Alexa hardware, and foreign media arstechnica believes that Amazon's Alexa business lost as much as $10 billion in 2022 (CTOnews.com Note: currently about 71.4 billion yuan).

While Amazon's Echo smart speaker device with Alexa has been successful in terms of market share, the hardware itself is' sold at cost', and people interact with Alexa mainly to play music or check the weather, rather than 'spending money on Amazon or anywhere else'.

However, Amazon said in a statement that the layoffs were due to "the company's decision to cancel some of its previous plans" after a series of Alexa smart hardware was abandoned as Amazon tilted more resources into its generative AI products.

▲ Amazon's previously launched Echo Pop speaker Amazon did not specify which hardware the company would eliminate, and the company has not yet released a version of Alexa based on AI, but the company unveiled an "early preview" version of the voice assistant in September, billed as "based on a customized new large language model optimized for voice interaction."

Related reading: "Amazon launches a new Echo smart speaker and plans to inject generative AI into Alexa voice assistant."

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