On Friday local time, US technology giant Amazon announced that it will lay off hundreds of positions in Alexa's voice assistant business unit, citing a change in business focus and investing more resources in the field of generative artificial intelligence.
According to Amazon Alexa& A memo sent to employees by Daniel Rausch, Vice President of Fire TV Business, states: "We are adjusting some of our work to better align with our business priorities and what we know is most important to our customers, which requires maximizing resource concentration on generative artificial intelligence
In addition, Amazon also plans to suspend some projects, but did not specify the exact scale of layoffs or which projects it plans to suspend. Rausch also said, "We are still very optimistic about the future of the Alexa department
Since the beginning of this month, Amazon has laid off employees in multiple departments, including the music and gaming departments, as well as some human resources departments. Christoph Hartmann, Vice President of Amazon Games, previously stated that after the initial restructuring in April, we clearly need to focus more resources on the areas with the highest growth potential to drive our business forward.
A spokesperson for Amazon stated that although most of the affected jobs are in the equipment department, some of the layoffs are also engaged in product development related to Alexa.
For a long time, Echo devices powered by Alexa have been the world's most popular smart speakers. This intelligent voice assistant has introduced many people to artificial intelligence chat robots, which can accept short voice commands, turn on lights, or play music.
Amazon founder Bezos is extremely optimistic about the prospects of Alexa and firmly believes that voice assistants will play a crucial role in future human computer interaction. Therefore, a large amount of funds have been invested in this department. During the peak period, Amazon had 5000 people developing Alexa and Echo.
However, Alexa is now facing new threats from super intelligent generative artificial intelligence developed by companies such as OpenAI. These new chat robots are not responding to simple inquiries with preset answers, but are more conversational and able to respond to complex requests.
Analysts say that Alexa Voice Assistant has a history of nearly 10 years, but it has failed to keep up with the pace of the artificial intelligence era. Competitors are encroaching on Amazon's core business market share, with Amazon's hardware business losing billions of dollars in recent years.
At the end of September, Amazon announced the addition of generative artificial intelligence to Alexa, which was also an attempt by the company to attract consumers. Amazon stated that its new generative artificial intelligence features will continue to focus on the core tasks Alexa is already focusing on - real-time news and information, smart home control, and home entertainment. Just like ChatGPT, users will be able to request Alexa to write poetry, create stories, or summarize news events.
Just last month, Dave Limp, the head of Amazon's device business, announced his resignation, and his position was replaced by Panos Panay, the former Chief Product Officer of Microsoft.
In the past year, Amazon has shed more than 27000 jobs throughout the company and cancelled many unprofitable projects, which is also part of the wave of layoffs in the entire technology industry in the United States after the pandemic.