Alexa costs Amazon $10 billion a year

The American e-commerce giant Amazon is investing heavily in the Alexa smart speaker. With this you can not only enjoy good quality sound, but also give commands. Unfortunately, things are not going as hoped for the American giant and the company has to invest quite a bit of money on Alexa.

Amazon Alexa is more than Echo

Alexa is more than just the popular Echo smart speaker. Behind the Alexa concept you will also find, for example, the artificial intelligence that converts the spoken voice of Alexa users into language that the computer can understand. At the moment that is only English, so Alexa is only really catching on in the Anglo-Saxon world. Amazon’s big dream is to use Alexa as the central hub for Amazon’s home automation universe.

Then you should think of the camera Ring, the smart Amazon division stitch and other Amazon home automation devices. In Amazon’s dream future, an endless stream of data from Amazon users will start, with which your company can feed artificial intelligence and in that way make it much better quickly.

Data is the new gold

Because one thing has become clear in recent years: data is the new gold and with a large amount of data you can grow artificial intelligence quickly. At the moment, every major company is trying to massively bet on artificial intelligence. Of course, Amazon can’t stay behind. But the problem with the Alexa was that the data it provided wasn’t worth much. Because Alexa users mainly used it to give commands to their home automation system, from two to three words at the most.

Drastic cutbacks on Alexa

As Amazon is currently suffering from low sales and lower profits, the company is laying off around 10,000 people. A major part of these layoffs are in Alexa’s department. Instead, Amazon now wants to focus on healthcare and wellness-related services.