Old article, so probably bigger now: https://www.businessinsider.com/what-amazons-10000-employees-working-on-alexa-are-doing-2019-1 What do so many people working on a voice assistant actually do? ML training data? How does that compare to Google Assistant and Siri? Also 10k+ orgs?
Curios about the upload now
Article from 2019. Now is about 20k
Wow that is incredibly fast growth. Is it actually mostly SWEs? Or just a lot of people annotating data, etc?
Sorry. Just exaggerating it :p
IMO, voice based advertising (conversational) will take off in some time
Spotify has started doing some interesting stuff I think. I recall an article about advertisements that asked free tier listeners if they were interested in some product sample
Yes Spotify is investing heavily in podcast advertising. Display ads will be outdated soon.
Alexa is by far the best assistant in the industry. The number of ppl working on it is justified.
It's overstaffed.
Overstaffed. +1
Over-staffed just because it’s a “must win” for them I guess? How would Google Assistant and Siri be staffed in comparison?
So apart from playing Spotify songs, in the last week, can anyone tell me what they have used it for? I have all the assistants at home (echo, Google mini, Siri in the phone) and the only time I use them is to play songs (usually Alexa), setup a timer (Siri in the iPhone) and in done rare occasion call a restaurant (usually Google Assistant). The uses just seem limited to me and the monetization almost not existent
I agree, these things are useless. The amount of yelling and follow up commands it needs to do something meaningful, I would rather just do it on my phone.
Hey, don't underestimate them. You can turn on and off lights too.
We got too excited about the possibilities and gave that org a lot of headcount. It grew too fast and ended up overstaffed and chaotic. My info is from a year ago. Might be more sane now.
Also home automation was a hot thing and everyone was doing it.
There's 10k people waiting at their computers to respond to your commands. How do you think they got the idea for their show Upload?
I guess not so different from ScaleFactor then. When you can’t get the automation right, just hire lots of contractors XD https://www.morningbrew.com/emerging-tech/stories/2020/07/22/scalefactor-reportedly-struggled-develop-software-promised-customers