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.
Hiring is “investment”, wages are “expenses”.
CapEx vs OpEx
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.
Most of f500 is overrated. At a certain point, only driving the stonk is the main motivator to do anything.
Gotta love the stock market. It incentivizes gaming the numbers like this
Pump the stonk 📈🚀🌕
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
This is true, however it’s also the first time Google has done a mass layoff, so I wouldn’t say it’s pointing to a yearly trend.
My company hasn’t! Fingers crossed!🤞
Good luck
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?
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…
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.
The enshittification will continue until quarterly profits improve…
…then they will continue to continue.
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
It works reasonably well for timers, alarms and weather.
Mine is a glorified kitchen timer that occasionally plays Spotify while I do dishes.
Except that it ALWAYS continues to listen after the command and you have to yell at it to fuck off.
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.
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
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
Unplugged mine last week. Fuck em.
Honestly, I pretty much only use mine for relatively cheap home speaker groups.
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?”
Even worse, they laid them off by having the voice assistant call to inform them.
“Would you like to reply?”
“… I don’t know, but here’s what I found on the web.”
This is getting wayy 2 real for me
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!
Just got this blog article in my email from Google, might shed some more light as to why this layoffs happened.
https://blog.google/products/assistant/google-assistant-bard-generative-ai/
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Google replaced them with Google Assistant. It can now take care of its own development.
It’s like Skynet is The Wizard of Oz, but really it’s just Clippy behind the curtain.
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.
The AI itself is downvoting
