According to sources in the company, a team led by the CEO Andy Jassi himself has been examining for several months far-reaching measures to cut the company’s expenses, which arose as a result of a combination of factors such as the layout of its warehouses, which reached a monstrous scale during the Corona period, and inflation. One of the divisions in which The team is considering cutting Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant. According to the Journal, the Alexa division employs 10,000 people, so it is a huge unit, which together with the division of devices based on it (Echo) loses 5 billion dollars every year.
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The reason Alexa loses money is the amount of investment in it, and the difficulty of turning it into income. This is because, unlike Amazon’s attempt to use Alexa to get people to order products from the site by speaking, most people use the voice assistant for a very small number of operations, such as turning smart lights on and off. Now, according to the report, the company is considering whether to continue adding new features to the assistant – which requires a financial investment – or to stop the waste, as Microsoft did at the end of the previous decade for the voice assistant Cortana, before announcing its “death” about a year and a half ago.