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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't seem t

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't seem to be a big revenue generator I remember constantly hearing about projects other teams were working on thinking "why would anyone use that" or "how would that ever make money" Just trying to shoehorn alexa into as many domains as possible It was like empire building at its finest I would joke that the canary tests were the biggest customer for a lot of services 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 Back when it was announced alexa org was being hit harder by layoffs that did not surprise me

spike021 2y ago
I once heard about a feature dogfooding invite that was sent out specifically for people with babies because they wanted to use Alexa always-listening to activate when a baby was crying and automatically order diapers or something ridiculous like that.
- alexathrowawa9 2y ago
  I remember getting that invite! You could use "baby crying detected" as an automation trigger
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- bagels 2y ago
  Doesn't even make sense. Babies cry all the time for a multitude of reasons, none of which are informed by how many diapers are in the house.
  - throwway120385 2y ago
    Yeah and given how often we get it wrong as parents, imagine the absolute dumpster fire it would be to have a voice assistant get it 10x as wrong.
  - shermantanktop 2y ago
    Babies just need to learn to cry only when the diapers in the garage are running low. How hard could that be?
    - crabmusket 2y ago
      Clearly the feedback loop is too long currently. If we could instantly dispense diapers onto the baby as soon as it started crying, that would improve learning outcomes and encourage experimentation.
      - shermantanktop 2y ago
        Sounds like a virtuous cycle to me! Babies who cry a little at a time will be awash with diapers, leading to secondary market opportunities. Now we just need a two-sided marketplace to capture that business and charge a modest fee.
  - sa46 2y ago
    Interestingly, there is an app, Chatterbaby [1], that claims to detect why a baby is crying based on the acoustic features of the cry. I've used it with middling success. That'd be a neat integration: "Alexa, why is my baby crying?" [1]: https://www.chatterbaby.org/pages/ https://www.chatterbaby.org/pages/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41390-019-0592-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41390-019-0592-4
    - UberFly 2y ago
      "Your baby is crying because it doesn't like the brand of formula you purchase. We recommend Amazon Basics!"
      - dyingkneepad 2y ago
        "We recommend you try UBQTLONR this time!"
        teractiveodular 2y ago
        Now with extra melamine!
      - Electricniko 2y ago
        "Your baby is crying because you often raise your voice and make unreasonable demands of those around you. Would you like to add insurance for a lifetime of psychiatric help to your cart?"
        39896880 2y ago
        This sounds like a joke but Amazon made a device specifically to listen to people talk all day and tell them how they sound to others. It is called Halo.
    - smolder 2y ago
      Your baby is crying over the intrusion of big tech into their private life before they even have object permanence.
- laidoffamazon 2y ago
  It wasn't for diaper ordering, Alexa has a feature to detect particular sounds (like glass breaking, dog barking etc) for monitoring and alerting purposes. Basically it involved adding hotword recognition for not just the N number of hotwords but also Y number of sounds for particular devices.
Balgair 2y ago
Hey, I gotta ask a few questions here, given this oportunity: How many people actually 'worked' there? Like, really did something all day? What was the pay like? What were the internal politics like? Any good stories?
- alexathrowawa9 2y ago
  > Any good stories? One time I walked into a dark room with like 50 test devices to get something and somehow accidentally triggered them and all 50 started talking at the same time Was both hilarious and creepy
  - LegitShady 2y ago
    the furby horror
deepfriedrice 2y ago
> Just trying to shoehorn alexa into as many domains as possible It happened outside of Alexa too. Every team with a public facing product was directed (it seemed) to come up with some sort of Alexa integration. It was usually dreamed up and either a) never prioritized or b) half assed because nobody (devs, PMs, etc.) actually thought it made any sense.
brazzy 2y ago
I guess that's what happens when you're generating absurd amounts of revenue and want to "reinvest" it all: anything that even vaguely smells of "innovation" gets money thrown at it like crazy, and you end up incentivizing bullshitting.
- bloggie 2y ago
  My optimistic side tells me that Blue Origin was founded as a tech lab / app lab / skunkworks and not necessarily as a company with the goal of putting humans in space, that has suffered from said bullshitting. But my cynical side tells me the latter.
bobnamob 2y ago
> I would joke that the canary tests were the biggest customer for a lot of services This is true for a surprising number of amzn/aws products
asdasdsddd 2y ago
I've interviewed many people on Alexa before. From what I gather, its just a giant switch statement, and each individual "path" takes a bunch of effort to support and there are thousands of paths for music, ordering, commands, etc. It's peak AI == if statement architecture.
- laidoffamazon 2y ago
  I think describing the NLU Engine as a switch statement is underselling it a bit. Determining domain and intent alone requires more than that (frequently, at least).
- SahAssar 2y ago
  Do you mean actual coded if statements as in actually human written code like if (question.match(/^what is (.*)/)) return wikipedia.search(question) or something more automated?
  - laidoffamazon 2y ago
    Not like that, but once you get to first party Alexa Skill themselves there's a bunch of match rules that make up a big chunk of the traffic. Don't know exactly how much. The longtail is done through ML means.
- ihkasfjdkabnsk 2y ago
  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 "important" 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). What this culminated in is a platform where 80% of request, and pretty much 99% of "commands" are served by rules built with a team of linguists.
  - laidoffamazon 2y ago
    Later on, there were methods to generate FSTs themselves without manual human curation.
conductr 2y ago
My take on it was that Alexa was developed at a time they were trying really hard to solidify their continued existence as a tech company; AWS and kindle came around then too. The stock market values tech companies much higher than retail companies. That’s what justified the headcount expense
- nickm12 2y ago
  AWS and Kindle were developed a decade before the Echo.
  - conductr 2y ago
    Yeah, it’s just how I remember it. It was a period of time, not a moment. A bit longer apart than i remembered but that phase of amazons management and growth felt like a cohesive moment to me as an outside observer. Their strategy has changed since then. And have they released much new tech that wasn’t expansion or iterations of those?
baxtr 2y ago
I would love to see the initial “vision doc”. How were they envisioning to make lots of money with it in the first place?
SomeCallMeTim 2y ago
I am actually surprised that there are thousands of people working on Alexa. WTF are they all doing?! It's pretty much unchanged from the outside in any way that's relevant to me compared to where it was in 2014. And the few changes I've noticed have been things breaking. I used to, for instance, have a script (I forget the Alexa term) that would turn off a few lights and then play a Pandora radio station when I gave it a "bedtime" command. Worked great for about a year, and then the Pandora plugin suddenly refused to take any combination of commands that I could figure out to play a particular Pandora station in my account. This is true from outside of the automation as well, by the way. It's just completely broken. The weather app integration is annoying too. I wanted weather to use a different weather source, and instead of just giving me results from that weather source, it would always preface it with "Weather from BlueSky" or whatever. Maybe it's their fault and they wanted the ad blurb? But as a consumer, it sucked. I just wanted more localized weather, not an ad every time I asked for the weather. And the "AI" behavior of the app...it was just awful. I could get better answers from Google Home devices across the board. The best Alexa would do if I asked it a question is to read the first paragraph of a Wikipedia entry, and it was about a 1 in 4 chance it would actually choose the correct Wikipedia entry. OH, and don't get me started on the Android Alexa app (!!!). Again, the most major change was a UI update where the most important feature I ever use was hidden behind another layer of menus for no particularly good reason. And the "Kindle Accessibility" feature of reading Kindle books is so flaky I doubt anyone on the team ever uses it, from random pauses to sudden jumps back to read from the beginning of the section of the book you started on 10 minutes ago, looping forever on those same 10 minutes. Sorry. I know it wasn't your fault. But I finally gave up on using Echo devices, and the only reason I still even have the Alexa app on my phone any more is so I can have it read a Kindle book while I'm driving, and it's so amazingly frustrating to use that it would likely be better if it didn't even exist. It's more "customer frustration" than useful.
xnx 2y ago
> Just trying to shoehorn alexa into as many domains as possible The original AI technology spamming: Alexa Integration

spike021 2y ago

I once heard about a feature dogfooding invite that was sent out specifically for people with babies because they wanted to use Alexa always-listening to activate when a baby was crying and automatically order diapers or something ridiculous like that.

alexathrowawa9 2y ago
I remember getting that invite! You could use "baby crying detected" as an automation trigger
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
bagels 2y ago
Doesn't even make sense. Babies cry all the time for a multitude of reasons, none of which are informed by how many diapers are in the house.
- throwway120385 2y ago
  Yeah and given how often we get it wrong as parents, imagine the absolute dumpster fire it would be to have a voice assistant get it 10x as wrong.
- shermantanktop 2y ago
  Babies just need to learn to cry only when the diapers in the garage are running low. How hard could that be?
  - crabmusket 2y ago
    Clearly the feedback loop is too long currently. If we could instantly dispense diapers onto the baby as soon as it started crying, that would improve learning outcomes and encourage experimentation.
    - shermantanktop 2y ago
      Sounds like a virtuous cycle to me! Babies who cry a little at a time will be awash with diapers, leading to secondary market opportunities. Now we just need a two-sided marketplace to capture that business and charge a modest fee.
- sa46 2y ago
  Interestingly, there is an app, Chatterbaby [1], that claims to detect why a baby is crying based on the acoustic features of the cry. I've used it with middling success. That'd be a neat integration: "Alexa, why is my baby crying?" [1]: https://www.chatterbaby.org/pages/ https://www.chatterbaby.org/pages/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41390-019-0592-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41390-019-0592-4
  - UberFly 2y ago
    "Your baby is crying because it doesn't like the brand of formula you purchase. We recommend Amazon Basics!"
    - dyingkneepad 2y ago
      "We recommend you try UBQTLONR this time!"
      - teractiveodular 2y ago
        Now with extra melamine!
    - Electricniko 2y ago
      "Your baby is crying because you often raise your voice and make unreasonable demands of those around you. Would you like to add insurance for a lifetime of psychiatric help to your cart?"
      - 39896880 2y ago
        This sounds like a joke but Amazon made a device specifically to listen to people talk all day and tell them how they sound to others. It is called Halo.
  - smolder 2y ago
    Your baby is crying over the intrusion of big tech into their private life before they even have object permanence.
laidoffamazon 2y ago
It wasn't for diaper ordering, Alexa has a feature to detect particular sounds (like glass breaking, dog barking etc) for monitoring and alerting purposes. Basically it involved adding hotword recognition for not just the N number of hotwords but also Y number of sounds for particular devices.

Balgair 2y ago

Hey, I gotta ask a few questions here, given this oportunity: How many people actually 'worked' there? Like, really did something all day? What was the pay like? What were the internal politics like? Any good stories?

alexathrowawa9 2y ago
> Any good stories? One time I walked into a dark room with like 50 test devices to get something and somehow accidentally triggered them and all 50 started talking at the same time Was both hilarious and creepy
- LegitShady 2y ago
  the furby horror

deepfriedrice 2y ago

> Just trying to shoehorn alexa into as many domains as possible It happened outside of Alexa too. Every team with a public facing product was directed (it seemed) to come up with some sort of Alexa integration. It was usually dreamed up and either a) never prioritized or b) half assed because nobody (devs, PMs, etc.) actually thought it made any sense.

brazzy 2y ago

I guess that's what happens when you're generating absurd amounts of revenue and want to "reinvest" it all: anything that even vaguely smells of "innovation" gets money thrown at it like crazy, and you end up incentivizing bullshitting.

bloggie 2y ago
My optimistic side tells me that Blue Origin was founded as a tech lab / app lab / skunkworks and not necessarily as a company with the goal of putting humans in space, that has suffered from said bullshitting. But my cynical side tells me the latter.

bobnamob 2y ago

> I would joke that the canary tests were the biggest customer for a lot of services This is true for a surprising number of amzn/aws products

asdasdsddd 2y ago

I've interviewed many people on Alexa before. From what I gather, its just a giant switch statement, and each individual "path" takes a bunch of effort to support and there are thousands of paths for music, ordering, commands, etc. It's peak AI == if statement architecture.

laidoffamazon 2y ago
I think describing the NLU Engine as a switch statement is underselling it a bit. Determining domain and intent alone requires more than that (frequently, at least).
SahAssar 2y ago
Do you mean actual coded if statements as in actually human written code like if (question.match(/^what is (.*)/)) return wikipedia.search(question) or something more automated?
- laidoffamazon 2y ago
  Not like that, but once you get to first party Alexa Skill themselves there's a bunch of match rules that make up a big chunk of the traffic. Don't know exactly how much. The longtail is done through ML means.
ihkasfjdkabnsk 2y ago
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 "important" 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). What this culminated in is a platform where 80% of request, and pretty much 99% of "commands" are served by rules built with a team of linguists.
- laidoffamazon 2y ago
  Later on, there were methods to generate FSTs themselves without manual human curation.

conductr 2y ago

My take on it was that Alexa was developed at a time they were trying really hard to solidify their continued existence as a tech company; AWS and kindle came around then too. The stock market values tech companies much higher than retail companies. That’s what justified the headcount expense

nickm12 2y ago
AWS and Kindle were developed a decade before the Echo.
- conductr 2y ago
  Yeah, it’s just how I remember it. It was a period of time, not a moment. A bit longer apart than i remembered but that phase of amazons management and growth felt like a cohesive moment to me as an outside observer. Their strategy has changed since then. And have they released much new tech that wasn’t expansion or iterations of those?

baxtr 2y ago

I would love to see the initial “vision doc”. How were they envisioning to make lots of money with it in the first place?

SomeCallMeTim 2y ago

I am actually surprised that there are thousands of people working on Alexa. WTF are they all doing?! It's pretty much unchanged from the outside in any way that's relevant to me compared to where it was in 2014. And the few changes I've noticed have been things breaking. I used to, for instance, have a script (I forget the Alexa term) that would turn off a few lights and then play a Pandora radio station when I gave it a "bedtime" command. Worked great for about a year, and then the Pandora plugin suddenly refused to take any combination of commands that I could figure out to play a particular Pandora station in my account. This is true from outside of the automation as well, by the way. It's just completely broken. The weather app integration is annoying too. I wanted weather to use a different weather source, and instead of just giving me results from that weather source, it would always preface it with "Weather from BlueSky" or whatever. Maybe it's their fault and they wanted the ad blurb? But as a consumer, it sucked. I just wanted more localized weather, not an ad every time I asked for the weather. And the "AI" behavior of the app...it was just awful. I could get better answers from Google Home devices across the board. The best Alexa would do if I asked it a question is to read the first paragraph of a Wikipedia entry, and it was about a 1 in 4 chance it would actually choose the correct Wikipedia entry. OH, and don't get me started on the Android Alexa app (!!!). Again, the most major change was a UI update where the most important feature I ever use was hidden behind another layer of menus for no particularly good reason. And the "Kindle Accessibility" feature of reading Kindle books is so flaky I doubt anyone on the team ever uses it, from random pauses to sudden jumps back to read from the beginning of the section of the book you started on 10 minutes ago, looping forever on those same 10 minutes. Sorry. I know it wasn't your fault. But I finally gave up on using Echo devices, and the only reason I still even have the Alexa app on my phone any more is so I can have it read a Kindle book while I'm driving, and it's so amazingly frustrating to use that it would likely be better if it didn't even exist. It's more "customer frustration" than useful.

xnx 2y ago

> Just trying to shoehorn alexa into as many domains as possible The original AI technology spamming: Alexa Integration