The Secret Origins of Amazon's Alexa: From Whiteboard Sketch to Voice Assistant
In 2011, Jeff Bezos sketched a $20 voice-controlled device on a whiteboard, challenging Greg Hart to lead its development. Despite having no hardware experience, Hart assembled a secretive team to tackle the complex challenge of far-field speech recognition. Racing against Apple's Siri, the team invested hundreds of millions and acquired startups like Ivona to build a standalone assistant that could understand commands from across a noisy room.
There's another team building a phone. But this is way more interesting.
- asdfman123
Boss: build this, it will drive sales. People will order everything through vocal prompts in the future without even looking at the products.
Low level employee who has to build it: *screaming internally*
- hex4def6
For an article about the origins of Alexa / Echo, it seems a pretty glaring omission to completely skip over the organization that actually designed / made the hardware.
That, for what it's worth, was done by Amazon Lab126 in the Bay Area under Dave Limp. Again, it's very strange he's not mentioned once in this either.
- fourthark
(2021)