One of the most crucial aspects of Alexa’s success compared to other similar assistants like Siri and Google Assistant is that Amazon has significantly opened up its ecosystem, making it easily integrable with Internet of Things products from countless brands, as we could see in the analysis of the Echo Show 8 or the Echo Hub.
Amazon has not only done this, but the possibility of creating apps and skills for Alexa offers an additional enormous potential that Google and Apple options do not have, and Amazon has exploited this up until now by rewarding top developers in the form of payments, something that, according to Bloomberg, will soon come to an end.
Indeed, it seems that the Seattle giant is already informing its main collaborators about this unexpected change of conditions, which will mean that starting from June 30, 2024, they will no longer receive their monthly payments according to the old rewards program.
This cut aligns with all of Amazon’s moves around Alexa, as the company led by Jeff Bezos had already laid off hundreds of workers in 2023, including many from the Alexa division. The idea is nothing other than to divert resources towards the development of AI and a proprietary Large Language Model (LLM) that competes with GPT and definitively boosts Alexa’s capabilities towards a truly intelligent assistant.
As indicated by the spokesperson of the shopping giant, the Alexa incentive program was created in 2017 offering a monthly credit of $100 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) in addition to providing additional direct payments to developers with greater popularity and/or penetration of their skills. Many of these programmers never received money, but some indeed managed to pocket thousands of dollars each month, especially at the beginning of the program and with the initial evolution of Alexa.
By 2020, these bonuses had already been reduced, as the skills were losing prominence without generating too much money for Amazon, and now all resources are going to artificial intelligence and newer tools that use LLM.
According to Raemhild, the numbers do not lie, and less than 1 percent of developers around Alexa were still using these reward programs in any case… There wasn’t much more to gain there!