Enormous failure - Amazon will lose $10 billion in a year because of Alexa voice assistant

E-commerce giant Amazon began laying off staff a few weeks ago. In total, the company wants to lay off 10,000 employees, a significant portion of whom develop hardware for speakers with the virtual assistant Alexa.

Here's What We Know

Alexa is a loss-making business for Amazon, even though the voice assistant has been on the market for about 10 years and is the third-largest user base in the U.S. (71.6 million). Only Siri and Google Assistant have more users - 77.6 million and 81.5 million, respectively.

The division responsible for the development of Alexa is part of the Worldwide Digital group. For the first three months of 2022, the loss was $3 billion. Business Insider reports that Alexa will bring the company a total loss of $10 billion for 2022.

Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wanted to monetize the virtual assistant, but over time the former CEO's interest in the venture began to wane. New CEO Andy Jassy is also not interested in the project.

As we wrote above, Alexa has 71.6 million users in the United States alone. In addition, the company records a billion interactions with the voice assistant every week. Even such huge numbers do not allow Amazon to monetize Alexa. This is due to the fact that the vast majority of user requests to the smart assistant are reduced to a request to turn on or off music, as well as to talk about the weather. Therefore, the sale of portable Echo speakers at almost no cost can not fully justify itself.

Source: @arstechnica