The business of voice assistants is going through a big crisis, so much so that Amazon decided to lay off thousands of employees related to the development of Alexawhich hasn’t caught on as the company thought it would.
The layoffs are part of a larger initiative to restructure the sector, which will be completely rethought.
In total Amazon announced that it will lay off 10,000 people, many of which are used in the development of electronic systems such as Echo and others where Alexa is installed. What is the reason for the cuts to Alexa? The use of the voice assistant has substantially collapsed, as reported by the company, so much so that it has produced most of the losses of the “Worldwide Digital” division, that of Alexa and Amazon Prime Video.
But what is the underlying problem? Paradoxically, the devices with Alexa installed are very sold, since they are often in the Amazon shop window, but they do not produce revenues, because they are sold at a loss. Amazon would have liked to derive from some advanced features of the voice assistant, but users have simply chosen not to use them, probably due to a certain mistrust or, more simply, because they complicate operations that are very simple to perform using a telephone or other system, such as ordering a pizza . So devices with Alexa have become a way to listen to music or know the weather forecast, that is, they are exploited for the most basic functions, which do not produce significant revenues.
So the idea of Bezos, the owner of Amazon, to install a kind of on-board computer of the Enterprise in every home seems to be in danger of sinking.
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