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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.

8 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.

    1. Re:Voice activated assistants are the... by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      My wife has to ask me to take out the garbage 3 or 4 times before getting frustrated and picking up a handheld device (frying pan).

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
  2. Good by JohnFen · · Score: 2

    The more engineers working on nonsense like that, the more opportunities there are for the rest of us.

  3. 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.

    2. Re:The project must be late... by cascadingstylesheet · · Score: 3, Funny

      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?

      What are they doing? Must be Alexa is really a Mechanical Turk!

      Every time you say "Alexa, ..." one of those 5000 people jumps to attention and handles your request :)

  4. 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.

  5. Data is everything by el_smurfo · · Score: 2

    Google has so much data feeding into it's AI and Assistant programs, I'm sure the coders are probably just there to make sure the things don't go sentient on them. Amazon has no such access and Alexa's low quality responses to many requests really show this. We got a Dot for free and use it for exactly two things, adding items to shopping lists and setting reminders for the kids. Nearly every other thing outside of "what'st the weather" gets an "I'm sorry, I don't know".