Amazon’s secret war on Android: The company has a plan to cure Alexa’s addiction to Google’s operating system.
Amazon’s Alexa division is cutting costs across the board, having laid off thousands of employees and reshuffled projects over the past 18 months. Another key part of that plan is to unify Alexa’s backend technology, which is set to result in some devices moving off of the Android-based operating system the company has used for years, Business Insider has learned.
Internally named “Unified Alexa Device Software,” the project is aimed at delivering a “single Alexa Device Software codebase” that will help reduce operational costs and address various performance issues, according to internal documents obtained by BI and people familiar with the matter. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press.
The team in charge of the project expects to ultimately save almost 50% of its overhead costs, one of the documents says. Once completed, Amazon expects a faster rollout of Alexa features, improved customer experience, and less developer friction, among other benefits.
“While we do recognize that there is an upfront cost to unification, we have seen that taking a 12-24 month investment in unification to reduce our operating costs by almost 50% in the long term is a sound investment,” one of the documents says.
The plan is part of a major revamp of the Alexa business. Alexa and the devices unit were among the first teams hit by Amazon’s layoffs in late 2022 after having lost billions of dollars. The unit has gone through a number of changes since then, including the hiring of the former Microsoft executive Panos Panay as its new leader. More recently, Alexa has been focused on adding ChatGPT-like technology and launching a new paid service, as BI previously reported.
Amazon has been scrutinizing every business unit’s performance lately. More than 27,000 corporate employees have lost jobs since 2022, and multiple projects have been shut down. Wall Street has applauded the efficiency drive, which has shown how much potential CEO Andy Jassy had for cost-cutting and how profitable Amazon can be when streamlined.
In an email to BI, an Amazon spokesperson said the change in Alexa’s technology was part of a regular review process.
“With the new Vega OS, Amazon is reducing its reliance on the Android-based Fire OS. But the people told BI the move wasn’t necessarily motivated by ditching Google’s technology. Instead, they said, the goal was simply to be more efficient with resources and to improve performance.
“Android-based devices are going to stick around for a while,” one of the people said.
One area that’s set to see less investment is tablets that come with Alexa capabilities. One of the people said usage of Alexa on tablets was low, given most people just looked at the screen instead of making voice commands. They said Amazon wanted to build a lighter version of Alexa on tablets so fewer resources would be used to support features.
This person added that the same thinking applied to the home robot Astro, given the low level of engagement on that device. Since the number of Astro devices in use is significantly lower than any other Amazon device, the company wants to reduce the level of investment going into enabling Alexa on the home robot.
“It’s also an acknowledgment that Alexa has not scaled the way Amazon had expected it to,” this person said.
Amazon has tried to unify Alexa’s software stack since at least 2016, but failure to do so has only deepened existing problems, the document says. Amazon, at one point, had four different teams supporting the same voice middleware technology across different devices, causing higher operational costs and inefficiencies.
“The idea is we can build and ship the same device on cheaper technology,” one of the people familiar with the matter told BI.
The feature-parity gap between Amazon’s own Alexa devices and third-party voice assistants using Alexa has long been a problem, both internally and externally, according to the people.
They said Amazon’s own devices, such as the Echo, usually got new features ahead of third-party devices, but some employees felt the technology used in Amazon’s devices was much more robust and mature than the tech found in external Alexa-powered gadgets. That has generated negative customer feedback and deteriorating partner relationships.
Some Amazon employees who worked on third-party devices felt as if the Echo was their biggest competitor. “It’s always tough when we get the tech six months later for third-party products,” one of these staffers told BI.
The new unified Alexa foundation will significantly reduce these feature parity gaps, the internal documents predict. For example, prior to unifying the backend, one of Alexa’s wake-word-detection features existed only for the Fire OS, so Amazon had to separately build one for the Vega OS, the document says.
With UADS, Amazon expects to roll out Alexa features more quickly while eliminating feature-parity gaps among different devices, the document says. It also anticipates fewer performance issues and lower development costs.
The company hopes the initiative will also reduce the need to hire so many employees. Alexa aims to grow head count for each of its projects to an average of 1.2 times the current team sizes, instead of more than doubling head count under the old approach, the document says.
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