Amazon is removing the Celebrity Personalities feature on Alexa devices, partly due to the massive rounds of layoffs the company has been undergoing this year. Amazon has eliminated over 10,000 jobs this year and its Alexa Voice Assistant division lost several employees during Amazon’s layoff rollout.
Alexa has been costing Amazon more money than it was creating through subscription revenue. As stated by various sources, “Just about every plan to monetize Alexa has failed” and former employees called the venture “a colossal failure of imagination… a wasted opportunity.” One way Amazon could have driven up revenue from Alexa was to require a subscription to Amazon Prime in order to utilize the device. Amazon did not as it was initially trying to sell as many of the Alexa devices as possible, thinking they would naturally catch on as a new must-have technology.
If you bought a celebrity voice you can get a refund but you must ask Amazon customer service for a refund.
Amazon began selling the smart speaker in 2014 as a way to encourage people to place more orders. Alexa’s initial success over the next four years helped the company sell over 100 million Alexa devices by 2018, but interest in the smart speaker and profits have since seen a sharp decline. Last year alone, Alexa cost Amazon approximately $10 billion.
Alexa’s Celebrity Personalities launched in 2019 allowing users to pay 99 cents for the Samuel L. Jackson personality voice. Instead of saying “Alexa” or “Computer”, users could command Samuel L. Jackson to start their music, check the weather forecast, or set a reminder for an upcoming event. As more celebrity voice features were added, such as Shaquille O’Neal and Melissa McCarthy, the cost went up to $4.99 each.
Samuel L. Jackson’s celebrity voice feature is no longer working as of April 30th, 2023, however, Melissa McCarthy and Shaquille O’Neal’s Celebrity Personalities are still working…. for now. These features are still available to members who have already purchased the virtual celebrity voices but will expire on September 30th, 2023.
There are talks from Amazon of shutting down the Alexa service entirely due to a lack of interest compared to other smart speaker options.