Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

5,000 People Are Working On Amazon's Digital Assistant Alexa (geekwire.com)

Posted by msmash on from the big-bet dept.

Amazon said this week at an event unveiling the next generation Echo device that it has the equivalent of a small town of people -- more than 5,000 -- working on the company's digital assistant, Alexa. From a report: And Amazon's not even at full capacity when it comes to Alexa. The company's job site shows close to 1,100 open positions on a variety of Alexa-focused teams. Voice-activated assistants appear to be the Next Big Thing in the tech world, and Amazon is competing with a who's who of tech giants, including Apple, Microsoft, Google and more. Interestingly, Amazon and Microsoft recently formed a pact that will see the two company's digital assistants gain the ability to talk to one another.

4 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Voice activated assistants are the... by zerofoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...TV 3D glasses of the computing world.

    All of them suck - Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant - all are worthless in somewhat noisy environments.

    Got kids living at home? Drive a car with the windows cracked open or even the AC running? Forget about using any of them.

    I do admit - I love watching people ask their phones and speakers something 3 or 4 times before getting frustrated and picking up a handheld device. It's comical.

  2. The project must be late... by bobbied · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Let's throw more developers at it! (management)

    Seriously? 5,000 on staff for that thing? Something is seriously wrong here because I cannot imagine needing that many people for a project like this. What are all these folks doing? Certainly not just Alexa system development. What else are they doing?

    --
    "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
    1. Re:The project must be late... by Gilgaron · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Well, Amazon runs cloud services for pretty much everything. So, if they treat the voice activated digital assistant as a sort of OS (I guess like the movie Her?) that can hop into the cloud and take care of your banking that is being run off of their servers already, then Chase (supports Alexa banking!) gets a leg up on Citi (didn't pay for the license, but switch to Chase and get a free month of Amazon Prime!) or whatever and Amazon gets a slice of everything else you do online that isn't direct e-commerce. They probably see being the dominant voice assistant as being the next search engine/OS wars of decades prior. And, sure, if you can really talk to the thing like a person you'll probably develop an irrational emotional attachment to it and then they've got customer lock in. So that puts them into as dominant a position as MS used to have and Google has in terms of platform, while also being the company you buy your mail order groceries from.

  3. Re:So Stupid by houstonbofh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Unless you actually look at it. I sniffed the wire on Alexa. Once a day there is a small packet exchange. Occasionally that small packet exchange will result in a moderately large download. I am assuming checking for updates and occasionally updating. Other then that, it NEVER initiates traffic without the alert keyword (Alexa by default), and every time it does, it is accompanied by the devices saying something, and what it "heard" is saved in the app for you to look at. I can not say it will always be this way, as it self updates, nor can I say that "deleting" the recordings actually deletes anything other then your list...

    But from my personal testing, it seems to be playing very fair right now.