The tech industry can't seem to get a break from the wave of layoffs conducted since last year. Amazon, in particular, has been reducing its workforce in various departments. With the latest job cuts from the retail giant, employees working on Alexa are affected.
Latest Amazon Layoffs
The team who are working on the company's well-known voice assistant in the device and services division are the latest to be laid off by the retail giant. In case you don't know, Amazon's voice assistant Alexa can be through the company's Echo smart speakers.
The company released a statement clarifying that only a relatively small percentage of the total number of people in the Devices business were let go, which equates to about "several hundred roles." Given Amazon's number of employees, that, to them, qualifies as a small percentage.
Amazon's recent layoffs are the result of the growing use of generative AI. As artificial technology has become the preferred investment, the company decided to discontinue initiatives and discarded several projects, as reported by Ars Technica.
With the new AI model that will power Alexa, the company boasts new capabilities and better responses from the voice assistant. Amazon announced that the new large language model (LLM) has been "custom-built and specifically optimized for voice interactions."
With the new AI-powered Alexa, users will no longer have to start their commands with "Alexa." Plus, the response times will be faster and users can now interact with Alexa in a more conversational manner.
The recent layoffs aren't the first time that the company's Devices division has experienced. Prior to this, there had already been 27,000 job cuts. This could just be Amazon's way of making sure that Alexa is still profitable, especially since past records show that it has not been.
A Better, AI-Powered Alexa
Amazon boasts that they have studied a lot about conversations over the last few years to make Alexa feel more natural to converse with. Through the LLM, the voice assistant can be more personalized and will be able to understand context.
They would even give Alexa a personality so she wouldn't seem too robotic. The problem is that Amazon admitted that they have been using user conversations with Alexa to train their AI model, which of course, raised concerns about privacy.
An Amazon spokesperson said that customer voice recordings were used to train company algorithms, adding that they believe raining Alexa with real-world requests is essential to deliver a better experience for users, as reported by Gizmodo.
Conversations, even in text, have been used to train several other AI models to make the technology seem more human when it comes to interactions. This is even why many social networking platforms have implemented API pricing.
The issue lies with what kind of data is recorded by Amazon. With social media sites, the conversations are already publicly available, so no private data is taken. Conversations with Alexa, however, may contain sensitive details that the user does not intend for others to hear.
