<story><title>Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/tech/amazon-alexa-devices-echo-losses-strategy-25f2581a</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>asdasdsddd</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve interviewed many people on Alexa before. From what I gather, its just a giant switch statement, and each individual &amp;quot;path&amp;quot; takes a bunch of effort to support and there are thousands of paths for music, ordering, commands, etc. It&amp;#x27;s peak AI == if statement architecture.</text></item><item><author>alexathrowawa9</author><text>Throwaway here but I used to work in Alexa org at Amazon and was amazed by how big the org was (thousands and thousands of people) considering it doesn&amp;#x27;t seem to be a big revenue generator&lt;p&gt;I remember constantly hearing about projects other teams were working on thinking &amp;quot;why would anyone use that&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;how would that ever make money&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Just trying to shoehorn alexa into as many domains as possible&lt;p&gt;It was like empire building at its finest&lt;p&gt;I would joke that the canary tests were the biggest customer for a lot of services&lt;p&gt;And the way amazon works with SOA even what seems like a small feature ends up being a couple services, a pizza team of 10 devs + SDM, the overhead is huge&lt;p&gt;Back when it was announced alexa org was being hit harder by layoffs that did not surprise me</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ihkasfjdkabnsk</author><text>Throwaway, used to work at the NLU unit of Alexa about 5 years ago. There is some ML going on but as with all ML projects I have worked on people want control. This means you add rules for the &amp;quot;important&amp;quot; stuff. You also add test cases to make sure the ML works. But if you already have those test cases, why not just match on them directly? There are also advanced techniques for generating examples (FST for example).&lt;p&gt;What this culminated in is a platform where 80% of request, and pretty much 99% of &amp;quot;commands&amp;quot; are served by rules built with a team of linguists.</text></comment>
<story><title>Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/tech/amazon-alexa-devices-echo-losses-strategy-25f2581a</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>asdasdsddd</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve interviewed many people on Alexa before. From what I gather, its just a giant switch statement, and each individual &amp;quot;path&amp;quot; takes a bunch of effort to support and there are thousands of paths for music, ordering, commands, etc. It&amp;#x27;s peak AI == if statement architecture.</text></item><item><author>alexathrowawa9</author><text>Throwaway here but I used to work in Alexa org at Amazon and was amazed by how big the org was (thousands and thousands of people) considering it doesn&amp;#x27;t seem to be a big revenue generator&lt;p&gt;I remember constantly hearing about projects other teams were working on thinking &amp;quot;why would anyone use that&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;how would that ever make money&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Just trying to shoehorn alexa into as many domains as possible&lt;p&gt;It was like empire building at its finest&lt;p&gt;I would joke that the canary tests were the biggest customer for a lot of services&lt;p&gt;And the way amazon works with SOA even what seems like a small feature ends up being a couple services, a pizza team of 10 devs + SDM, the overhead is huge&lt;p&gt;Back when it was announced alexa org was being hit harder by layoffs that did not surprise me</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>novok</author><text>IMO with my experience with siri being AI-style unreliable in many ways, like bit flips when saying turn off the lights makes the dimmer go to %100, I think it&amp;#x27;s better to do the switch statement for the dozen or so query types that probably represent %90 of traffic, like weather, music, home control, unit conversions, etc in exchange for way more reliability.</text></comment>