Amazon is gutting its voice-assistant Alexa

All these voice assistants seem to be stuck at a point were the only commands you can tell them is “set a 10 minute countdown timer” or “set an appointment tomorrow at 10am”.

Why cant they still understand basic sentences? Everytime im wrestling back and forth with the “AI” until it finally understands me.

Also, the Alexa thing was always on and recording audio all the time. But for what? It never actually got any better and just got bad PR for it.

I think there is really a gap in this market for a product that will actually really be able to work with natural sentences.

Unfortunately the title is very clickbaity, but I didn’t want to edit it. Here is the full title:

Amazon is gutting its voice-assistant Alexa. Employees describe a division in crisis and huge losses on 'a wasted opportunity.'

More of a meta question related to the working of HN...

This one was posted 3 hours ago. This same post of 1 hour ago is also visible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680904 links to the same url.

My experience is that posting something that was posted before, even sometimes within days, will link to the same post. Or gets sometimes within seconds as a "[dupe]" even if not's the same page but might be the same subject.

Why was that not the case here?