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

Re:Amazon Says It Has Over 10k Employees Working on Alexa, Echo by RandallBrown on Sunday January 06, 2019 @08:54PM (#18842139)

A friend of mine who worked at Amazon, not in an Alexa related division so take this with a grain of salt, said that Alexa is basically a huge series of if statements.

I imagine they're working on improving it to more powerful natural langue processing, but it wouldn't surprise me if decisions they made to get it to market years ago are preventing it from being as good as Google right now.

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Re:Amazon Says It Has Over 10k Employees Working on Alexa, Echo by mabbo on Sunday January 06, 2019 @09:10PM (#18842193)

Take what I say with another grain of salt, but I work at Amazon and have a large number of friends that moved over to the Alexa org.

It's not a huge series of if statements. Maybe it was at one time, but 10k developers can do better than that.

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Re:Amazon Says It Has Over 10k Employees Working on Alexa, Echo by ams6110 on Sunday January 06, 2019 @10:33PM (#18842563)

I would be surprised if 10k developers could do much of anything. The communication overhead would be enormous.

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Re:Amazon Says It Has Over 10k Employees Working on Alexa, Echo by mabbo on Monday January 07, 2019 @06:54AM (#18844478)

Amazon is not a perfect company, but they have done a very good job at figuring out how to organize large scale software organizations. Emphasis on SOA whenever possible, teams that aren't too large, and principle engineers who focus on large scale organizational problems.

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Re:Amazon Says It Has Over 10k Employees Working on Alexa, Echo by zwkrt on Sunday January 06, 2019 @10:44PM (#18842602)

There's a reason most really nice things are designed by one person.

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