Amazon Says It Has Over 10k Employees Working on Alexa, Echo

Re:Amazon Says It Has Over 10k Employees Working on Alexa, Echo by partiallypro on Sunday January 06, 2019 @08:47PM (#18842116)

Seems pretty simple to me, Google has more data and users that keep adding even more data to optimize their offerings. I doubt Alexa has even 1/10th the users as Google's assistant.

This is the unfortunate barrier to entry when it involves big data. Even behemoths Amazon and Microsoft are stuck with smaller pools of voice data than Apple or Google. It makes it very difficult to compete...imagine being an even smaller player, you have no shot. If Amazon and Microsoft weren't cloud competitors I bet they'd do a joint venture. They are already playing the most friendly with each other.

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Re:Amazon Says It Has Over 10k Employees Working on Alexa, Echo by CydeWeys on Sunday January 06, 2019 @09:27PM (#18842267)

Amazon has still sold millions of these devices and thus has inordinate amounts of data. When you're talking about training sets that are, say, 1 trillion large vs 10 trillion, does it really make that much of a difference? It's diminishing returns. 10X the data size comes nowhere close to a 10X difference in quality at that scale.

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Re:Amazon Says It Has Over 10k Employees Working on Alexa, Echo by RestlessMind on Monday January 07, 2019 @12:33AM (#18843017)

I neither work on Alexa nor on Google Assistant. But based on my experience, going from 99% accuracy to 99.9% would require much more data than 0.9%. Same with adding each subsequent "9".

And the perceived quality difference between 99% accuracy and 99.99% accuracy is much much bigger.

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Re:Amazon Says It Has Over 10k Employees Working on Alexa, Echo by frankchn on Monday January 07, 2019 @01:47AM (#18843297)

In my experience, like with high availability, each additional 9 requires between double to 10x the resources to achieve.

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