How Alexa Dropped the Ball on Being the Top Conversational System on the Planet - Mihail Eric

Alexa put a huge emphasis on protecting customer data with guardrails in place to prevent leakage and access. Definitely a crucial practice, but one consequence was that the internal infrastructure for developers was agonizingly painful to work with.

It would take weeks to get access to any internal data for analysis or experiments. Data was poorly annotated. Documentation was either nonexistent or stale.

Pretty interesting. I wonder how and why Amazon handles (meta)data and access to it differently for advertisement and dev purposes.