Month: November 2022

Enlarge / The fourth-generation Echo device is a cloth-covered sphere with a halo at the base, contrasting with the squat plastic cylinders of earlier-generation Echoes. (credit: Amazon)

Amazon is going through the biggest layoffs in the company's history right now, with a plan to eliminate some 10,000 jobs. One of the areas hit hardest is the Amazon Alexa voice assistant unit, which is apparently falling out of favor at the e-commerce giant. That's according to a report from Business Insider, which details "the swift downfall of the voice assistant and Amazon's larger hardware division."

Alexa has been around for 10 years and has been a trailblazing voice assistant that was copied quite a bit by Google and Apple. Alexa never managed to create an ongoing revenue stream, though, so Alexa doesn't really make any money. The Alexa division is part of the "Worldwide Digital" group along with Amazon Prime video, and Business Insider says that division lost $3 billion in just the first quarter of 2022, with "the vast majority" of the losses blamed on Alexa. That is apparently double the losses of any other division, and the report says the hardware team is on pace to lose $10 billion this year. It sounds like Amazon is tired of burning through all that cash.

A division in crisis

The BI report spoke with "a dozen current and former employees on the company's hardware team," who described "a division in crisis." Just about every plan to monetize Alexa has failed, with one former employee calling Alexa "a colossal failure of imagination," and "a wasted opportunity." This month's layoffs are the end result of years of trying to turn things around. Alexa was given a huge runway at the company, back when it was reportedly the "pet project" of former CEO Jeff Bezos. An all-hands crisis meeting took place in 2019 to try to turn the monetization problem around, but that was fruitless. By late 2019, Alexa saw a hiring freeze, and Bezos started to lose interest in the project around 2020. Of course, Amazon now has an entirely new CEO, Andy Jassy, who apparently isn't as interested in protecting Alexa.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

This week is everyone's favorite shopping holiday: Black Friday. Google's Black Friday deals are already running on the Google Store and Amazon. Many of these represent the first discounts for Google's new hardware announced last month.

First up, we have phones, with Google offering $150 off the Pixel 7 Pro (Google, Amazon) and Pixel 6a (Google, Amazon), and $100 off the Pixel 7 (Google, Amazon). That Pixel 6a deal is a serious head-turner: $150 off the already-good $449 price makes for a $300 device that will meet most people's basic smartphone needs. Remember that the Pixel 6a has a near flagship-class Google Tensor 1 SoC. With Google (and really every other Android SoC vendor) not doing much performance-wise year over year, you'll get nearly the same benchmarks from the Pixel 6a as the normally $900 Pixel 7 Pro, but now for a third of the price. It has a great camera, water resistance, Wi-Fi 6e support, and a fast and clean build of Android with day-one updates. You're not going to wow anyone with a 60 Hz display, but if you just need a basic smartphone, this is a steal for $300.

The Pixel 7 Pro for $150 off is also a great deal. That makes for $750 for a phone with all the fancy extras, like a 120 Hz display and wireless charging.

Enlarge / A poison dart frog rendered as a 3D model by Magic3D. (credit: Nvidia)

On Friday, researchers from Nvidia announced Magic3D, an AI model that can generate 3D models from text descriptions. After entering a prompt such as, "A blue poison-dart frog sitting on a water lily," Magic3D generates a 3D mesh model, complete with colored texture, in about 40 minutes. With modifications, the resulting model can be used in video games or CGI art scenes.

In its academic paper, Nvidia frames Magic3D as a response to DreamFusion, a text-to-3D model that Google researchers announced in September. Similar to how DreamFusion uses a text-to-image model to generate a 2D image that then gets optimized into volumetric NeRF (Neural radiance field) data, Magic3D uses a two-stage process that takes a coarse model generated in low resolution and optimizes it to higher resolution. According to the paper's authors, the resulting Magic3D method can generate 3D objects two times faster than DreamFusion.

Magic3D can also perform prompt-based editing of 3D meshes. Given a low-resolution 3D model and a base prompt, it is possible to alter the text to change the resulting model. Also, Magic3D's authors demonstrate preserving the same subject throughout several generations (a concept often called coherence) and applying the style of a 2D image (such as a cubist painting) to a 3D model.

Enlarge (credit: LG Display)

LG Display will commercialize thin, vibrating speakers for cars in the first half of 2023, the company announced today. The Thin Actuator Sound Solution has similar dimensions to a passport and forgoes many of the bulkier parts of typical car speakers.

LG Display is known for developing display panel technologies and providing them to various companies, including the consumer LG brand. Its new speaker doesn't use a cone, magnet, or voice coil and doesn't require a speaker grille. Instead, the speaker relies on what the company described as a "film-type exciter technology," which vibrates off display panels "and various materials inside the car body" to create "3D" sound that LG Display claims is as good as what traditional car speakers produce.

LG even worked with a "global audio company" to develop the speakers, but we can't tell you if that's impressive or not because LG Display didn't specify the partner's name.

Enlarge (credit: The Washington Post / Contributor | The Washington Post)

Donald Trump has not tweeted since Elon Musk reinstated his Twitter account on Saturday. In interviews, Trump has suggested he no longer needs Twitter, planning to promote his next presidential run on his own social network, Truth Social.

"I don't see any reason for it," Trump said via video-conference when a panel at the Republican Jewish Coalition's annual leadership meeting asked if he’d be logging back in to Twitter, according to Reuters. Trump claimed that Twitter's "got problems," Bloomberg reported, and he could get better user engagement on Truth Social. Many have noted that Trump is also bound to give Truth Social a six-hour exclusive on any post before he’s allowed to post anywhere else.

Musk made the decision to reinstate Trump’s account after launching a poll that logged more than 15 million votes—with close to 52 percent voting in favor of bringing back the former president. Nobody’s sure how much of that vote was driven by bots, The Verge reported, but that didn’t stop Musk, who is painfully aware of how bots could impact polls, from claiming the vote was driven by legitimate users.

Enlarge / Domino's new fleet of 2023 Chevrolet Bolts are unmistakeable. (credit: Domino's Pizza)

While it may not be your favorite pizza-slinger, one has to respect Domino's Pizza for being forward-looking. Whether or not it actually launched the first pizza delivery service in 1960, it certainly popularized the idea and more recently has been testing autonomous vehicles and sidewalk robots to deliver pizza.

At some point, before robotic Domino's delivery is commonplace, its pizzas may speed their way to you in an electric car.

On Monday the company announced the arrival of more than 100 Chevrolet Bolts to select Domino's locations, with another 700 due by the end of 2023. You can even check on their progress online—of Bolt deliveries, not pizza deliveries, although that's possible, too, thanks to onboard telematics.