Layoffs Hitting Alexa Unit at Amazon Fails to Disrupt Project

The ongoing layoffs at e-commerce giant company Amazon, which has seen most of its employees at the Alexa unit affected have not in any way disrupted the cloud-based voice service project.

Amazon is currently laying off employees in its corporate and tech workforce, as the company has let go of workers in several divisions such as Alexa and the Luna cloud gaming unit.

The company’s devices and services organizations which oversee the development of products such as Echo Smart speakers, Kindle E-readers, and Alexa were among the group majorly affected.

However, despite the mass layoffs of workers at the aforementioned units, Amazon’s hardware chief David Limp has disclosed that the company is still committed to Alexa despite the wave of job cuts at the unit.

Speaking on the Alexa project, its hardware chief said,

“What we did is we looked at projects that were probably, in this uncertainty, the risk-reward for those projects and what they might deliver for customers wasn’t quite there. Part of that was in Alexa, part of that was in other parts of my organization.”

“Still, Amazon remains fully committed to the Alexa unit despite the company taking steps to be more disciplined with costs in a very uncertain economy. There are still thousands and thousands of people working on this project. It’s a big project.”

Amazon Alexa, also known simply as Alexa, is a virtual assistant technology largely based on a Polish speech synthesizer named Ivona, bought by Amazon in 2013.

The cloud-based voice service can control several smart devices using itself as a home automation system.

Users are also able to extend the Alexa capabilities by installing skills (additional functionality developed by third-party vendors, in other settings more commonly called apps) such as weather programs and audio features.

It uses automatic speech recognition, natural language processing, and other forms of weak AI to perform tasks.

As of November 2018, Amazon had more than 10,000 employees working on Alexa and other related products. In January 2019, the company’s devices team announced that they had sold over 100 million Alexa-enabled devices. On September 2019, if announced that Alexa will soon be able to mimic celebrities’ voices.

Meanwhile, Investors King understands that Amazon plans to inform employees who will lose their jobs starting January 18, 2023.

Last year in November, Amazon initially planned to lay off 10,000 workers, but as the global economic outlook continues to worsen, it disclosed that it has been forced to increase the number of its workforce that will be laid off.