Alexa Might Not Get Much Smarter Than It Is Right Now Leave a comment

“Hey Alexa, can you make some money?”

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Amazon is aiming to cut costs by slimming down a few of its much less worthwhile departments. The large one is Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant software program. Despite Alexa’s existence inside hundreds of thousands of Echo units and different sensible audio system all over the world, the enterprise of constructing, supporting, and licensing a voice assistant platform has apparently been much less worthwhile than Amazon hoped. (According to WSJ, the Alexa enterprise has been working at a $5 billion-per-year loss.)

Amazon has a pair choices right here. It can both spend money on Alexa and work so as to add extra features, or reduce its efforts to enhance the service and let it exist as is. However, because the WSJ report notes, most customers usually get right into a behavior of solely utilizing just a few key voice instructions. If that’s the case, it might make extra sense for Amazon to let Alexa be as a substitute of continuous so as to add extra options.

Alexa just isn’t the one voice assistant with an unsure future. Google made the same transfer in October, when a part of its cost cutting restructuring plan de-emphasized this system that places Google Assistant into accomplice units like sensible audio system. Both of those reprioritizations come as firms throughout the technosphere lay off thousands of employees. It will not be the tip of an period precisely, nevertheless it’s clear the businesses don’t see their voice assistants as high priorities when dealing with an financial downturn.

Here’s some extra information from the world of client tech.

Apple Spaces Out

If you’re liable to getting misplaced within the woods, Apple would love you to know that it’s going to quickly have your again. The firm has made a giant push into emergency response tech just lately. At its iPhone 14 announcement event in September, Apple touted its new capability to find individuals exterior of mobile or Wi-Fi reception vary. The service, which Apple calls Emergency SOS via Satellite, is launching later this month.

Apple has made a $450 million investment in emergency satellite tv for pc monitoring tech. Most of the cash goes to the US firm Globalstar, which operates the satellites used to transmit the messages. Apple’s SOS plan will cowl the US and Canada. It’s free for 2 years when you purchase an iPhone 14, although Apple hasn’t stated how a lot it’s going to cost clients after that.

LG Rolls Another One

Forget about foldables, rollables are the place it’s at. LG continues to advance its rollable display tech with a display screen materials that you just would possibly (ultimately) be capable of bend, curl, and warp as a lot as you want. This week, the South Korean firm confirmed off some stretchable display technology that it says can be utilized to provide screens hitherto unrealized flexibility. The stretchy show seems like a 12-inch strip of fruit leather-based with RGB lighting in it, which might be pulled across all method of surfaces. 20 p.c stretchability means it’s not precisely taffy, however LG says it might bend about as a lot as rubber. That flexibility may lend itself to wrapping screens round nearly any floor—clothes, furnishings, partitions.

To be clear, the stretchy sheet remains to be only a prototype. LG is creating the tech for South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy. The stretchy display screen dream remains to be manner off sooner or later, however LG says the plan is to finalize the federal government undertaking by 2024. If all goes effectively, the stretchy screens may then be carried out in client units.

Digging Up Mastodon

Ever since Elon Musk took over, Twitter has been in one thing of a free fall. Whether it’s due to the flood of hate speech, the influx of “verified” scammers, or the dismantling of ethics teams on the firm, advertisers and customers alike have fled the platform. Now, persons are scrambling to search out a substitute for Twitter that doesn’t really feel prefer it’s being flipped upside down and shaken for unfastened change. Many individuals have turned to the decentralized platform Mastodon. So many, actually, that Mastodon has buckled under the weight of all its new customers.

This week on WIRED’s Gadget Lab podcast, WIRED safety editor Andrew Couts joins the present to unearth Mastodon—the way it works, what the vibes on the platform are like, and whether or not it’s going to ever come near recreating the managed chaos that’s (or was) Twitter.