Google lays off employees working on its voice assistant::Up to 20 employees working on Google’s Assistant team have been cut.

  • malloc@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • andallthat@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        The bigger the company, the more they see people as just a headcount. Your performance doesn’t matter, your name is unknown, you’re not even a number, you are 1 of x number of y’s.

      • malloc@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Most of f500 is overrated. At a certain point, only driving the stonk is the main motivator to do anything.

    • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    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?

    • eltrain123@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m about to throw my google speakers away at this point. I feel like they are becoming more and more useless. Voice commands used to work fine, but lately this is a standard occurance.

      “Hey google, turn on the kitchen lights.”

      “I’m sorry. It looks like that device hasn’t been set up yet.”

      “Hey google, turn on the kitchen lights.”

      “Power controls are not available at this time.”

      “Hey google, turn on the kitchen lights”

      …lights turn on…

      • SmashingSquid@notyour.rodeo
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • datavoid@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        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

          • slumberlust@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Except that it ALWAYS continues to listen after the command and you have to yell at it to fuck off.

          • wrinkletip@feddit.nl
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            1 year ago

            Oh really? I can no longer get it to set a recurring alarm every monday through thursday. It’s just not understanding any of the commands there that it did before.

      • h0rnman@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’ve never before been so glad to read about someone else’s misfortune. Mine have been doing this for MONTHS and I thought it was just me imagining things

      • zwaetschgeraeuber@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        same. throwing out my speakers as they understand less each day as it feels. now its only a clap light switch and everything else, i at least have to ask 2 times

      • ikidd@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Every time I hear about some proprietary thing getting effectively bricked by the company that sold them so they don’t have to support them forever, I wonder “what did you think was going to happen?”

  • logicbomb@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Even worse, they laid them off by having the voice assistant call to inform them.

  • Glytch@ttrpg.network
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    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!

    • Plopp@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Google replaced them with Google Assistant. It can now take care of its own development.

    • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com
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      1 year ago

      Not sure why you’re being down voted. It’s certainly possible they’ve gotten to a point where Bard can handle what 20% of staff were doing. Maybe that 20% were doing NLP.