“Hey Alexa, can you make some money?”

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Amazon is aiming to cut costs by slimming down a few of its much less worthwhile departments. The large one is Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant software program. Despite Alexa’s existence inside hundreds of thousands of Echo gadgets and different good audio system around the globe, the enterprise of constructing, supporting, and licensing a voice assistant platform has apparently been much less worthwhile than Amazon hoped. (According to WSJ, the Alexa enterprise has been working at a $5 billion-per-year loss.)

Amazon has a pair choices right here. It can both spend money on Alexa and work so as to add extra capabilities, or reduce its efforts to enhance the service and let it exist as is. However, because the WSJ report notes, most customers sometimes get right into a behavior of solely utilizing a number of key voice instructions. If that’s the case, it might make extra sense for Amazon to let Alexa be as a substitute of continuous so as to add extra options.

Alexa will not be the one voice assistant with an unsure future. Google made an identical transfer in October, when a part of its cost cutting restructuring plan de-emphasized this system that places Google Assistant into companion gadgets like good audio system. Both of those reprioritizations come as corporations throughout the technosphere lay off thousands of employees. It is probably not the tip of an period precisely, nevertheless it’s clear the businesses don’t see their voice assistants as high priorities when going through an financial downturn.

Here’s some extra information from the world of client tech.

Apple Spaces Out

If you’re susceptible to getting misplaced within the woods, Apple would love you to know that it’s going to quickly have your again. The firm has made a giant push into emergency response tech just lately. At its iPhone 14 announcement event in September, Apple touted its new capability to find folks exterior of mobile or Wi-Fi reception vary. The service, which Apple calls Emergency SOS via Satellite, is launching later this month.

Apple has made a $450 million investment in emergency satellite tv for pc monitoring tech. Most of the cash goes to the US firm Globalstar, which operates the satellites used to transmit the messages. Apple’s SOS plan will cowl the US and Canada. It’s free for 2 years when you purchase an iPhone 14, although Apple hasn’t mentioned how a lot it is going to cost prospects after that.

LG Rolls Another One

Forget about foldables, rollables are the place it’s at. LG continues to advance its rollable display tech with a display screen materials that you just may (finally) have the ability to bend, curl, and warp as a lot as you want. This week, the South Korean firm confirmed off some stretchable display technology that it says can be utilized to offer screens hitherto unrealized flexibility. The stretchy show appears like a 12-inch strip of fruit leather-based with RGB lighting in it, which might be pulled across all method of surfaces. 20 p.c stretchability means it’s not precisely taffy, however LG says it might probably bend about as a lot as rubber. That flexibility might lend itself to wrapping screens round nearly any floor—clothes, furnishings, partitions.

To be clear, the stretchy sheet continues to be only a prototype. LG is growing the tech for South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy. The stretchy display screen dream continues to be manner off sooner or later, however LG says the plan is to finalize the federal government mission by 2024. If all goes nicely, the stretchy screens might then be applied in client gadgets.

Digging Up Mastodon

Ever since Elon Musk took over, Twitter has been in one thing of a free fall. Whether it’s due to the flood of hate speech, the influx of “verified” scammers, or the dismantling of ethics teams on the firm, advertisers and customers alike have fled the platform. Now, persons are scrambling to seek out an alternative choice to Twitter that doesn’t really feel prefer it’s being flipped upside down and shaken for free change. Many folks have turned to the decentralized platform Mastodon. So many, the truth is, that Mastodon has buckled under the weight of all its new customers.

This week on WIRED’s Gadget Lab podcast, WIRED safety editor Andrew Couts joins the present to unearth Mastodon—the way it works, what the vibes on the platform are like, and whether or not it is going to ever come near recreating the managed chaos that’s (or was) Twitter.