13 ms·
Amazon Says It Has Over 10k Employees Working on Alexa, Echo
- warent 8y agoMy guess is ~9950 of those employees just do data labeling.
- DiabloD3 8y agoThat still implies 50 of them are trying to make it seem like anything but a toy. I was given a Google Home Mini as a Christmas gift (the resident tech god for most people's lives doesn't have one? what, how can this be!? someone rectified that for me), and I've been toying with it... and its the Google assistant in my phone, but in a stand alone device. I mean, don't get me wrong, that's a lot more useful than people realize because.... IT ACTUALLY WORKS. Ridiculously loud kitchen fan hood roaring along at levels that are probably considered unsafe by OSHA standards? "Hey Google, do the thing." "Okay, I'm doing the thing." Upstairs, far away from it? Not even yelling at it, it understands me reasonably and does things alarmingly often. The best impossible magic? "Okay Google, turn my television off." My Chromecast is not named "television" nor "my television", is only referenced in my Home config as the default TV for that room (of which the TV and Mini share), and somehow turns the TV off even though the Chromecast does not expose this functionality anywhere in the Home app (and was assumed to only know how to issue exactly one HDMI CEC command (turn TV on and switch input to here) due to some undocumented and strange hardware issue... hundreds of threads across the Internet all about how can they turn the TV off even though they can turn the TV on, none of them ever figuring out how to issue CEC off or even if the Chromecast can... it can, and the assistant in my tiny speakers knows how to issue this probably undocumented command to the Chromecast). My experience with Alexa? Ideal listening conditions, no background noise, only me talking. "Alexa, do the skill that you know how to do and is advertised in the commercials on TV, any off them." "I'm not quite sure how to help you with that".
- Aeolun 8y agoAlexa is like a little kid, you just have to repeat yourself often, and sometimes she pipes up in the middle of a conversation because she wants to do something else. That said, she’s quite capable of turning my TV and lights on and off.
- Bahamut 8y agoSeems Siri is much better than Alexa as well - I often hear my roommate struggling with getting Alexa to do what she wants, and various other friends struggling with Alexa as well, usually because of accents. Smart assistants in general have a ways to go still, but perhaps in the next 5-10 years they will be very good.
- shimylining 8y agoI have been using Alexa for years. I've been controlling my TV and I have WiFi smart plugs. It is super useful and it has never had issues understanding what I was saying. I have noticed people who have issues they place the device next to a sound source such as a TV or fan or something and obviously this will mess it up. I also don't understand why so much hate for Alexa. Everyone in this thread just seems like a Debbie downer, shi*ing on everything all the time.
- ghaff 8y agoI find Alexa "voice recognition" quite, if not amazingly, good. Native English speaker but definitely not news anchor voice. The problem is in conversational understanding that drops off quickly beyond "What's the weather?"
- smokeyj 8y agoBecause it's a spying device people are installing in their homes. These are the same people that are going to complain that it was a huge invasion of privacy in 5 years. It's going to be Facebook all over again. People willingly hand all their data over to daddy Bezos and then wonder why Amazon National Healthcare is charging them insane premiums. Edit: The same people developing facial recognition for the DoD is developing eavesdropping devices for Americans to install in their homes. Why, after the Snowden revelations, would any rational person think the big-brother doesn't have a direct line into your home? Listening to your every word, to your childrens words, to their opinions in formation.. Seems willingly selfish to not only hand over your privacy, but everyone you invite into your life. Edit 2: Considering the investment being put into a smart-microphone, I can only imagine the market for the device is a skunkworks operation. Selling a perfect surveillance device to the CPC perhaps? Beat Google and their project dragonfly to the punch? Hmm
- wkearney99 8y agoAh yes, the old "the same people" conspiracy shit. Give it a rest. Bring up wireshark and watch if you're so certain "they" are doing that. I have. They're not. At least not with the Alexa device I've got. So maybe instead of spending so much on tinfoil for hats, maybe you should actually TRY some the devices. PROVE there's some actual conspiratorial activities going on. Or not, stfu is just as viable an option.
- kochikame 8y agoAgreed, technically it's amazing. My wife and I ave different native languages yet we can speak to it, combining both languages in a single inquiry/conversation and it replies to me in my language and to her in hers. Ingenious stuff, whatever people think of the privacy issues.
- jclulow 8y agoI guess it takes a lot of people to listen to the accumulated recordings from all of those people's living rooms!
- whttheuuu 8y agodebby downer
- verisimilidude 8y agoWouldn't be the first time, won't be the last. For example... https://www.businessinsider.com/expensify-is-proud-to-use-humans-in-its-automated-service-2017-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/expensify-is-proud-to-use-hu...
- notsofastbuddy 8y agoIs there any public info on the numbers for Google and Apple?
- saagarjha 8y agoApple likely has fewer people in their entire software engineering organization; they generally hire fewer people than you’d expect for most projects.
- Zaheer 8y agoW/o Paywall: https://outline.com/vqmqwg https://outline.com/vqmqwg This org could be it's own company (like many other Amazon orgs)! For context, number of employees at: Motorola (2014): 40,000 Nvidia: 11,528 AMD: 8,900
- njharman 8y agoI bet there are more Alexa customers than nvidia ones. And way more than direct AMD ones.
- kevinventullo 8y agoAmazon has sold about 35 million Echo units, which is a little under half of the total number of PlayStation 3 units sold to date, each of which has an Nvidia GPU in it.
- Kudos 8y agoAnd about 10 million Nintendo Switches, which are also Nvidia powered.
- new_guy 8y ago100 million, they released numbers the other day https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/ad2drt/100_million_alexa_devices_have_been_sold_yes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/ad2drt/100_mill...
- devoply 8y ago1 employee per 10,000 echos doesn't seem like much.
- giobox 8y agoIn an interview with the Verge this week, Amazon themselves finally revealed a relatively solid sales figure (by Amazon standards) - over 100 million units with Alexa pre-installed. Sure, this will presumably include some non-Amazon hardware, such as Sonos etc. It's unquestionably less than the number of devices containing some kind of Nvidia IP. However, that's still a pretty impressive number of devices, especially when being an Echo/Alexa interface is likely the primary function of many of these devices - something you can't say about Siri or Google Assistant to anything like the same extent given it comes as part of the OS on many phones. > https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/4/18168565/amazon-alexa-devices-how-many-sold-number-100-million-dave-limp https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/4/18168565/amazon-alexa-devi...
- tomwilshere 8y agoAnd it's still no match for Google.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- curiousDog 8y agoAnd yet, Google has way better speech recognition than Alexa.
- merb 8y agoand google cloud customers might get a google home for free.
- remir 8y agoTo be fair, Google has been working on speech recognition for longer and likely possess more data than Amazon.
- reaperducer 8y agoIs this why Google gave everyone free phone calls and voice mail for years?
- servercobra 8y agoYes, along with their 411 service at the start.
- slondr 8y agoAlmost certainly. They also pushed their voice assistant on Android almost as hard as Apple pushed Siri. Integrating it into default home screens, keyboards, etc.
- toomuchtodo 8y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411 > Google had stated that the company originally implemented GOOG-411 to build a large phoneme database from users' voice queries. This phoneme database, in turn, allowed Google engineers to refine and improve the speech recognition engine that Google uses to index audio content for searching
- RandallBrown 8y agoGoogle made a 411 service a long time ago for this exact reason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411
- arikr 8y agoDoes anyone have an approx breakdown by role? e.g. how many software engineers vs how many data labelers or how many are full-time vs contractors, etc
- guard0g 8y agoWow. Is the software that complex that it takes 10k employees to work with it?!! :)
- testplzignore 8y agoMe: That's a pretty complex thing to build. I'm guessing it'll take about 12 months. Management: Great! We'll hire 10000 people and have it done before lunch! Me: ...
- gdulli 8y agoThere's a force that makes big companies grow bigger to the extent that their success allows them to, not to the extent that it's needed.
- stuart_marshall 8y agoSoftware and organizations are always much more complicated than you would realize as an outsider. Most of those 10k employees are probably not software engineers. Businesses have many other functions. From a software standpoint, any system that support 100M clients with rich functionality is going to be shockingly complex.
- 908087 8y agoOnce Amazon/Google/etc manage to get their audio surveillance embedded into every device on earth, will breathing oxygen and speaking aloud be considered "agreeing to Amazon/Google/etc privacy policies"?
- aviv 8y agoMy 6yo son thinks Alexa is an actual person... he might be on to something.
- erikig 8y agoI wonder if any of the 10,000 people are actually named Alexa, and if so do they get any preferential treatment?
- dna_polymerase 8y agoMost likely they would rather get truckloads of horrible jokes.
- monk_e_boy 8y agoI always feel sorry for all the Alexas. And the Harry Potters who were living their lives just fine before the books. My friend is named Tressa Green. Her dad assured me he had no idea that most people pronounced Tres-sa as Tree-sa. [edit] this is a fun read: https://www.radiotimes.com/news/film/2018-03-22/meet-the-real-life-muggles-named-harry-potter/ https://www.radiotimes.com/news/film/2018-03-22/meet-the-rea...
- stuart_marshall 8y agoIf you look at the lists of ranked baby names by year, you'll see a massive drop off of Alexas about when Amazon shipped.
- Baeocystin 8y agoOne of my coworkers used to go by Alexa, and has since just switched to Alex. She is not happy about it, but none of the available wake words are ideal. I say computer and amazon too often to use those, and it baffles me that we can't just choose our own, which is something that the very first Droid phone supported.
- mkio 8y agoMaybe 9,900 of those employees are hired to step in anytime Alexa doesn't know how to interpret a voice command.
- kureikain 8y agoI have many alexa devices in my home and I love it. They solve lot of problem for us. From automate my home to a speaker(via bluetooth). But one thing concern me a lot is Alexa is constantly stream/read data to internet. I'm not sure what it's but it consume to 114Mbps per device. With that huge data it is sending back to Alexa, I imagine they may have a huge team of scientist to work on it. One thing I noticed is Alexa understand my broken English way better than my wife(native). Probably I have speak to it to much and it learned my voice.
- burtonator 8y agoIt's massively insane that people put microphones into their house and willingly stream all conversations to a private 3rd party in exchange for minor convenience.
- burtonator 8y agoWhat's the liability here when I go into someone's house... ? Do I give implied consent? What about states with two party consent?
- samstave 8y ago"Please take off your shoes" "Please turn off your Alexa"
- Pfhreak 8y ago"Alexa, please set an alarm for 12 hours from now to remind me that you are always listening"
- shimylining 8y agoWon't this be the same with any IoT service? You walk past peoples houses who have Ring, it's recording you.
- 8y ago
- RIMR 8y ago10,000 people, any my Echo still doesn't understand the difference between any of my smarthome devices that contain the word "lamp" in their names.
- hanoz 8y agoI hope at least some of them are working on Alexa's seeming inability to do any kind of learning on the go. For instance if, as you repeatedly inform me, there's no station called Summer FM Groove Salad, then maybe, just maybe, I mean Soma FM Groove Salad, like the one in ten times you hear me correctly.
- heywire 8y agoOh wow, I had completely forgotten about that station! Thanks for mentioning it!
- ddeck 8y agoI’d settle for the seemingly vastly simpler simple task of producing an app that doesn’t show me content that I can’t consume. I’m an Amazon Prime video subscriber currently located outside the US and the Prime Video app on Android, Roku, and PC, insists on listing all content, rather than what I am actually permitted to watch where I’m located. 90% of the titles shown subsequently show a “This title isn’t available in your region” once you actually click on it and bring up the summary page. It’s truly absurd that one needs to click through every single video one at a time to determine what is actually watchable. Netflix has no such issue and filters based on location.
- dangrover 8y agoThis. I never tell Alexa to set a timer for 15 or 50 minutes (only 16 or 49) due to tendency to confuse.
- 8y ago
- walterbell 8y agoHas anyone tried to build an open-source voice assistant using the $100 Respeaker far-field mike array dev board, https://respeaker.io https://respeaker.io & http://wiki.seeedstudio.com/ReSpeaker_Core_v2.0/ http://wiki.seeedstudio.com/ReSpeaker_Core_v2.0/? > ReSpeaker Core v2.0 is designed for voice interface applications. It is based on the Rockchip RK3229, a quad-core ARM Cortex A7, running up to 1.5GHz, with 1GB RAM. The board features a six microphone array with speech algorithms including DoA (Direction of Arrival), BF (Beam-Forming), AEC (Acoustic Echo Cancellation), etc. ReSpeaker Core v2.0 runs a GNU/Linux operating system ... Our BF and AEC algorithms are provided by Alango, a professional audio DSP company used in the automotive industry. Voice assistants are magical when they do-what-you-mean. If there was an active OSS community for voice assistants, it would enable experimentation with privacy-preserving architecture and customization for niche use cases and language.
- j88439h84 8y ago- https://github.com/NaomiProject/Naomi https://github.com/NaomiProject/Naomi - http://mycroft.ai http://mycroft.ai - http://snips.ai http://snips.ai
- walterbell 8y agoThat reminds me that Google has DIY kits at Target, but they are designed as Google service extensions. https://aiyprojects.withgoogle.com https://aiyprojects.withgoogle.com
- utopcell 8y agoHardware seems to be by far the easiest component of the equation. Google home minis are practically free.
- RodericDay 8y agothat's because you're paying to install spyware in your house
- remir 8y ago
- 40acres 8y agoAmazon must have a very decentralized recruiting methodology because I've been contacted by recruiters for Alexa at least 4 times. It seems like Alexa, Go, and AWS have massive staffing targets based on my interactions w/ recruiters.
- stuart_marshall 8y agoYes, every group in Amazon has its own recruiters who largely find candidates independently. However, Amazon does have a good central database of everybody who is contacted, who last talked with them, what happened with the contact, etc. And they're usually pretty good about having only one group active with a candidate at a time.
- yegle 8y agoAlexa seems to not understand simple questions like "current temperature in Celsius" which is really a deal breaker for me. (I don't own any Alexa device but when I visit Seattle they have one in the room).
- mr_custard 8y agoI don't care how many people they have working on Alexa or Echo - those things will never be allowed inside my house. Massive security risk.
- JacobJans 8y agoDo you have a smart phone? It's not any different. Edit: But it also constantly tracks your location and has a built in camera.
- opportune 8y agoSmart phones don't transmit voice data back to third parties, nor do they transmit photos taken in the native camera apps, so it is different
- millstone 8y agoHas there ever been a documented case of a smart phone randomly burst out in creepy laughter or sending private conversations to random contacts?
- tirpen 8y agoHere is Android sending private conversations to random contacts: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/01/06/android-sms https://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/01/06/android-sms
- ionised 8y agoEven if it was exactly the same (which it isn't), why mke the problem even worse?
- choward 8y agoMore people makes it even worse in my opinion.
- sys_64738 8y agoDo people like having these devices in their house? Don't you feel like they're listening to everything you say? My wife says these will never be allowed in my house.
- ams6110 8y agoI'll never own one. The privacy issues are mostly speculative but I just hate taking to computers. On my phone, I've disabled everything I can related to speech.
- brokenmachine 8y agoYour wife is wise. I won't have one in my house either. It's crazy to me that anyone would be ok with them post Snowden revelations.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lawrenceyan 8y agoAmazon is a competently run technology company with smart people from my limited experience. I wonder why Alexa is so much worse compared to Google Assistant then. Perhaps natural language processing / understanding applications aren’t as well researched or developed at Amazon? Maybe it’s the difference in culture between the two companies with Google being much more academic in nature and research oriented compared to the more process oriented operations / logistics focus of Amazon that has caused such a widening gap to build up?
- partiallypro 8y agoSeems pretty simple to me, Google has more data and users that keep adding even more data to optimize their offerings. I doubt Alexa has even 1/10th the users as Google's assistant. This is the unfortunate barrier to entry when it involves big data. Even behemoths Amazon and Microsoft are stuck with smaller pools of voice data than Apple or Google. It makes it very difficult to compete...imagine being an even smaller player, you have no shot. If Amazon and Microsoft weren't cloud competitors I bet they'd do a joint venture. They are already playing the most friendly with each other.
- CydeWeys 8y agoAmazon has still sold millions of these devices and thus has inordinate amounts of data. When you're talking about training sets that are, say, 1 trillion large vs 10 trillion, does it really make that much of a difference? It's diminishing returns. 10X the data size comes nowhere close to a 10X difference in quality at that scale.
- RestlessMind 8y agoI neither work on Alexa nor on Google Assistant. But based on my experience, going from 99% accuracy to 99.9% would require much more data than 0.9%. Same with adding each subsequent "9". And the perceived quality difference between 99% accuracy and 99.99% accuracy is much much bigger.
- 8y ago
- bsenftner 8y agoSeems like an 80/20 rule might apply here: 8K of them are in marketing, with the remaining 2K also being split 80/20 to 1,600 tech/infrastructure support and 400 actual ML/AI, device & application developers.
- cruella_deville 8y agothe link below points to the source code for alexa based personal assistants in a can. https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=.. https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=.... you can also access alexa by browser, but you need to sign in https://www.amazon.com/ap/signin?showRmrMe=1&openid.return_t.. https://www.amazon.com/ap/signin?showRmrMe=1&openid.return_t.... there is also a way of saddling an SDcard into the echodot debug port and booting whatever you have put on the SD thus you may run custom boot up on the dot and hax around. https://medium.com/@micaksica/exploring-the-amazon-echo-dot-.. https://medium.com/@micaksica/exploring-the-amazon-echo-dot-.... https://medium.com/@micaksica/exploring-the-amazon-echo-dot-.. https://medium.com/@micaksica/exploring-the-amazon-echo-dot-.... One of the most interesting things to get into is the MP3files that make up the dots responses to you, writing your own skills is cool too. and here are a bunch of fidjitty tricks to do to your dot. https://hackaday.com/?s=echo+dot https://hackaday.com/?s=echo+dot
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- m0zg 8y agoAnd those employees are doing a rather poor job on the AI side of things. Hardware itself is OK, it hears me better than its Google counterpart thanks to the phased microphone array. But both speech recognition and natural language understanding are piss poor and other than ordering stuff from Amazon and setting the time it's not useful for much, nor does it understand me in a sufficiently high percentage of interactions, nor is it in any way "conversational", the way Google Home is. Alexa app is also lackluster and feels like it's held together by duct tape, like all other Amazon apps. For me the quality of AI in this case outweighs the creep factor of Google. FWIW, I replaced my Echo with a Google Home Mini. Full disclosure: I'm an ex-Googler who nevertheless thinks that ads are cancer, and pervasive tracking shouldn't be legal.
- tracer4201 8y agoI have a few Echos that we bought a year ago over Christmas. We use it to play music and control home automation. It works relatively well. My husband has a thick russian accent, and with him it struggles sometimes. I don't use the app and so have no use for that. What are other things the Google home does better? Like help me understand the use case. You say Google Home is more "conversational", but how?
- m0zg 8y agoYou can mostly speak to it like you'd speak to a human, and in the vast majority of cases it will understand. No need for rigid commands. You can also ask clarifying questions and it will keep context. Its speech synthesis and response language is more "human" and "cheerful". I just wish it also had an echo-like microphone array. When it's playing music it sometimes can be difficult to get it to hear commands.
- walterbell 8y agoPrevious Echo models had the same issue with music. The latest Echo model will lower the music volume when it hears the wake word. Alexa can make phone calls that dial a landline number, which is not an option with Google.
- dbrgn 8y agoIf those 10k employees earn 90k$ on average, that would be 900 million dollars per year just for salaries. The echo dot costs 30$. I'm sure Amazon just wants to make a great user-centric product and will not agressively violate your privacy to make more money! </sarcasm>
- IloveHN84 8y agoHow many of them are working on tagging manually the audio tracks for machine learning?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rhlala 8y agoReally hudge, how they are going to make it very lucrative? Monthly payment? Or sponsored hidden ads?