Google lays off employees working on its voice assistant

• Google has laid off a handful of employees working on its voice assistant.
• The affected employees were independent contractors. 
• Google has been making strategic cuts across the company throughout the year.

Google has laid off a handful of employees who worked on its voice assistant, Insider has learned.

Several independent contributors working on Assistant were informed on Monday that their roles were being eliminated, according to a person familiar with the matter and an internal employee document that tracks employee layoffs across the company.

The total number of affected employees could not be learned, but the internal document claimed up to 20 ICs were laid off. The affected employees were data scientists, it said.

The document also noted that some of the affected employees had been transferred from the Bard team to the Assistant team last Friday and received an invite to a meeting about their role just hours later.

The document is compiled by employees and collates information posted internally and externally about job cuts.

“1 of the affected is on Maternity leave, and another has cancer,” the document noted.

Affected employees have 60 days to find a new role within the company or they will have to leave.

“In order to optimize our team structures around our highest priorities, we’ve reorganized our team to best support our strategic business objectives,” a Google spokesperson told Insider in a statement.

Google previously announced its plans to overhaul its Assistant with features powered by generative AI, some of which have begun rolling out. In August, the company said it would eliminate “a small number” of roles as part of the renewed focus. It’s unclear if these recent cuts are related to that announcement.

Google began the year by laying off 12,000 employees and has since been making smaller strategic cuts across the company in areas such as Google News and its health division Verily.

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