Amazon Is Said to Plan to Lay Off Thousands of Employees

Re:Amazon Is Said to Plan to Lay Off Thousands of Employees by nblgbg on Monday November 14, 2022 @12:50PM (#33597991)

I worked for Alexa before. If I remember correctly there are only 4 use cases of it like weather, smart devices, music and timers/alarms. There used to be 10k employees at that time of which 3k were working in music alone. There was definitely a bloat at that time.

The third party ecosystem never caught up and there is no killer app for Alexa other than those 4 use cases. The API (slots/intents) is limited and hard to create any useful interaction with it. My gut feeling is many divisions will be affected in Alexa.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon Is Said to Plan to Lay Off Thousands of Employees by ghaff on Monday November 14, 2022 @01:01PM (#33598149)

That describes me to a T. It's a convenient alarm in my bedroom and sometimes timer in the kitchen. Good for a cursory weather report if I don't need all the details. Sometimes play some music before going to sleep. Use it to turn my bedroom light on and off. That's about it.

[ Parent | on HN ]