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Comment by Ecstatify | Hacker News Reader

Doesn’t work once, never using it again. If I can’t trust it to work as expected I’ll never use it to make purchases.

For Siri I just use it to set alarms. It’s incredible how much money has been wasted on “digital assistants”.

Agreed.

I recall, when they initially appeared on the market, cries of how they would be used to spy on us and collect vast amounts of personal data to sell.

I take these announcements of “colossal failure” as sign those fears were overblown.

Building a speaker with mic and some ML does not cost 10B dollars. Above is a PR piece to justify layoffs and restructure of Amazon. You want to make sure that engineers in AWS are not leaving when you want to fire some people in other places. You can trim fat without losing critical people.

Word on the street has been that Alexa was overstaffed for years.

Maybe it doesn't have to cost 10B but it looks like there were in fact a lot of costs.

There are more than 20,000 people working on Alexa in Amazon. That's more than 5B in salaries a year.

I worked with a guy that switched team, coming from an Alexa team dedicated to supporting jokes on the devices. It was dozens of people dedicated to just that, and that was a SMALL thing.

10B is absolutely not a surprising number.

It's absolutely insane how much waste there is in Western economies--all fueled by free money. Glad that party is finally coming to an end.

Almost as insane as Eastern economies building skyscrapers that are never used.

what the hell? were they making up new jokes for it? If they were hiring engineers rather than comedians then I can see where the problem was.

That is nuts. 20,000 people? Do they have large armies of people debugging individual conversational failures?

I worked on a backend service for Echo for a bit so was exposed to the internal stuff. There are a ton of people behind this project, as in, lots of things were done manually. There is a PM for "dog facts", for example. He makes at least 250k in total comp per year. His cost to the company is at least about the same (for simplicity), so 250k/year is spent just on dog facts (and I'm guessing some other fact categories).

10B would then pay for 5000 employees for 8 years (echo was released in 2004). My impression is that there were more than 5000 people working on Alexa between devs, QA, PMs, TPMs, managers, designers, etc, so I'm not surprised by $10B at all. In fact, it seems low after doing the calculation above, but people do switch projects or are shared so maybe it just seemed like that to me.

It lost $10BB. Doesn’t mean it cost only $10 BB.

There have been device sales and as such revenue.

The article claims that the devices are loss leaders. If so, device revenues are smaller than what it costs them to produce them, sell them to customers, and deliver them.

“loss leader” is not explicitly defined. It’s not clear at all if the devices are sold for less than their marginal cost of manufacturing or their total cost of manufacturing (ie including R&D).

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