During the first quarter of this year, Amazon's "Worldwide Digital" unit, which includes everything from the Echo smart speakers and Alexa voice technology to the Prime Video streaming service, had an operating loss of over $3 billion, according to internal data obtained by Insider.While Alexa was once one of the company's most rapidly growing projects, the mounting losses and massive job cuts underscore the swift downfall of the voice-assistant and Amazon's larger hardware division.Bezos was also the team's biggest advocate, pushing it to reduce Alexa's response time far below industry standards.By then Alexa was getting a billion interactions per week, but most of those conversations were trivial, commands to play music or ask about the weather.They even hired a team of experts to track the behavior of Alexa and Echo users on Amazon, and how they were likelier to spend more on Amazon.com or sign up for Prime membership."