By Greg Bensinger SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Some workers within Amazon’s once-storied hardware division – responsible for popular devices like the ...
By Greg Bensinger SAN FRANCISCO - Some workers within Amazon’s once-storied hardware division – responsible for popular devices like the Kindle reader and Echo voice-assistant – say moraleBy Greg Bensinger
The company – the world’s biggest online retailer - is holding a devices and services launch event on September 20 where it is expected to feature refreshed versions of some existing products like the Fire tablet, Fire TV stick and Kindle Scribe e-reader, among other announcements. Reuters was unable to determine Amazon’s full plans for the announcement.
Amazon is secretive about its internal projects at Lab126, which has long been crucial to its drive to position itself as a tech innovator. Not all of them will be produced commercially, sometimes due to financial or market concerns, the sources said, while some have already been reworked or canceled altogether.
Amazon, the people said, is trying to address flagging interest in its Alexa voice assistant nearly a decade after it was launched and as it faces competition from AI chatbots from Alphabet’s Google and a host of startups, including Microsoft-backed OpenAI. ChatGPT and other similar tools have dazzled consumers and investors since late last year with their ability to construct longform and coherent text answers to complex prompts, a format that is difficult to translate to a voice assistant.
CEO Andy Jassy has been reducing Amazon’s headcount after roughly doubling it during the pandemic in response to surging online sales. The retrenchment also affected Amazon’s retail unit, cloud computing, grocery and advertising divisions.
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