Amazon is letting go of hundreds of employees from its Alexa unit as part of a shift in focus towards generative AI.

Amazon.com Inc. is letting go hundreds of employees from the business unit that develops its Alexa voice assistant.

Daniel Rausch, the Vice President of Amazon’s Alexa and Fire TV unit, shared the recent developments in an internal memo, as reported by GeekWire.

Rausch explained that Amazon is making a workforce reduction, affecting “several hundred” roles across the U.S., Canada, India, and other countries. The impacted employees will receive a separation payment, transitional health insurance benefits, external job placement support, and paid time to secure a new position.

In the memo, Rausch emphasized that despite the layoffs, Alexa remains widely used by consumers, with users interacting tens of millions of times per hour. The decision to reduce the workforce is part of Amazon’s strategic reallocation of resources towards enhancing Alexa’s generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

“We’re shifting some of our efforts to better align with our business priorities, and what we know matters most to customers — which includes maximizing our resources and efforts focused on generative AI,” wrote Rausch.

Amazon introduced the latest generative AI feature for Alexa, called Let’s Chat, in September. This feature eliminates the need for users to say a wake word before each request, allowing Alexa to consider information from past interactions when processing new user requests.

In a previous update, Amazon added a more advanced generative AI feature to its Alexa-powered Echo Show smart screens, enabling users to create short animated stories through natural language prompts, including illustrations, background music, and sound effects.

Looking ahead, Amazon might prioritize allowing Alexa to interact with other applications in its generative AI roadmap. Google has already ventured into this territory with its Assistant, introducing a generative AI version capable of fetching information from Gmail and Google Docs and performing tasks like writing travel itineraries.

Google’s new Assistant is powered by the Bard chatbot, driven by an internally developed large language model called PaLM 2, which understands over 100 languages, processes more data at once, and has access to an extensive knowledge repository.