Google lays off employees working on its voice assistant::Up to 20 employees working on Google’s Assistant team have been cut.
Seems like all Fortune 500 companies are laying off 5-10% of their staff every year to pump end of year report.
Have seen cuts across multiple industries. Not just tech.
Have seen that too. The canned press release from all of them is something like “as part of our continued effort to make the org more efficient we have aggregated tram X with team Y and as a result a handful of roles were no longer needed. Our company remains focused and confident in our growth”. Has AI taken over the PR department too?
From what I can see, this is not even about individual performance. It looks like a continuous game of musical chair where an entire team here and there is suddenly decimated or completely removed with non-existent internal communication.
They find it easier/cheaper to lay off a bunch of people and then hire again.
Hiring costs for new people don’t factor in financial reports apparently.
Gotta love the stock market. It incentivizes gaming the numbers like this
So according to a quick search, Google employs ~ 178k people, making this far less than 5-10%.
But yeah, cuts keep happening until interest rates start trending downwards again, basically.
G fired like 12K people at the beginning of the year.
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/20/1150234270/google-layoffs-12000-jobs
Then smaller groups of layoffs throughout the year and usual churn. Adds up to ~5-6% for the year
I’m sorry, I don’t understand. But would you like to hear why employees working on its voice assistant are being laid off by Google?
Alexa is the same and used to work fine. My favorite is “Alexa, turn on the fan” turns on the fan in my mother’s room but “Alexa, turn off the fan”correctly turns off the fan in my bedroom. I ended up getting a HomePod and using home assistant to add all my devices to HomeKit. Shit on Siri all you want but at least she can turn the right devices on and off and on first try.
I unplugged mine a few weeks ago. I realized literally the only thing I use it for is occasionally finding my phone… besides that, it fucks up basically every instruction I give it
Even worse, they laid them off by having the voice assistant call to inform them.
I hope it’s the one’s who decided to make it so sensitive. I don’t need to be lectured by a fucking robot when I tell it to fuck off. I didn’t mean to summon it in the first place now it’s just going to take longer to go away.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Google has laid off a handful of employees who worked on its voice assistant, Insider has learned.
The total number of affected employees could not be learned, but the internal document claimed up to 20 individual contributors were laid off.
The document is compiled by employees and collates information posted internally and externally about job cuts.
Google previously announced its plans to overhaul its Assistant with features powered by generative AI, some of which have begun rolling out.
In August, the company said it would eliminate “a small number” of roles as part of the renewed focus.
Contact reporter Hugh Langley at hlangley@protonmail.com or on the encrypted messaging apps Signal and Telegram at +1 (628) 228-1836.
The original article contains 326 words, the summary contains 116 words. Saved 64%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
