Alexa, the voice assistant made in Amazon is in trouble. According to Amazon employees interviewed by Business Insiderthe artificial intelligence of the king of e-commerce has never met with the expected success and would even be very expensive for Amazon.
Alexa reports very little
Following the huge wave of layoffs that hit Amazon recently, tongues seem to be loosening among employees who no longer hesitate to fire red balls at Alexa. An employee interviewed by Business Insider Alexa calls Alexa “a missed opportunity” and the entire project “a colossal failure of imagination.”
Born in 2014, Amazon’s voice assistant was to revolutionize the way we interact with our computers and especially the way we spend on Amazon. But the company’s wild expectations never materialized. The Echo speakers did not encourage Amazon customers to consume more as the company hoped. Most voice commands were limited to basic interactions like asking for the weather report or starting a timer. Little monetizable interactions for Amazon. Even Amazon’s famous “skills,” which allow businesses to advertise their services through Alexa, aren’t bringing in enough money to cover the losses.
And Alexa is expensive
As a result, the project carried out for a time by Jeff Bezos quickly lightened the company’s coffers. Nestled within the “Worldwide Digital” division with the Echo speakers and Amazon Prime Video, the development of Alexa would have mainly represented the 3 billion losses that the branch incurred in the first fiscal quarter of the year. Worse still, according to an Amazon employee, the division hardware of the company is expected to post about 10 billion in losses this year. The Echo speakers having been imagined as a portal to the huge Amazon supermarket, they are sold at cost and bring almost nothing to the company. At the same time, production and R&D costs related to Alexa have swelled like never before.
The arrival of a new CEO, much less attached to the project than Bezos was, and the difficult economic conditions that all tech giants are going through have therefore encouraged Amazon to cut into the teams responsible for Alexa and the speakers. Echo. The e-commerce giant is not the only one wanting to save money on this kind of project. Google, too, has reportedly shifted its priorities to reduce spending on Google Assistant. Bad weather for the AI definitely.