I worked at Alexa. I'm not surprised by the massive loss - R&D was substantial, and nobody will ever be comfortable buying via voice (I own multiple Echo devices, use them extremely frequently, but disabled voice purchasing the first day I set them up). I did see multiple attempts at alternative monetization, like special voices via neural TTS translation (which work awesome by the way) but the price point will never come close to recouping even the trained model GPU investment I'd bet.

Ambient intelligence is science fiction level cool - especially if it follows you around throughout multiple contexts like Alexa does - but if Amazon's not willing to take the hit on it this halting further inflow seems like a prudent move.