Alexa to be more like a person
Conversation is Amazon’s goal
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Amazon wants you to have long, real conversations with Alexa, its popular personal digital assistant.
The e-tail giant recently released new tools to app developers that allow Alexa to whisper, show emotion and pause naturally, like we humans do. And that’s just the start, said Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s head scientist for Alexa, who is playing a key role in the retailer’s efforts in artificial intelligence for Alexa — using computers to converse with us.
“I truly believe that for AI to be useful in our daily lives, it has to be something you can connect with,” Prasad said. “Conversation is the next step, to be more human-like.”
Alexa competes with other personal digital assistants like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and the Google Assistant and has emerged as one of the leaders in voice computing. The Echo product is one of Amazon’s most popular, and many head-tohead reviews cite Alexa as the most effective.
Alexa, most often heard in the form of an Echo or Dot speaker, is good at playing us our morning news and music on command and telling us what the weather and daily calendar looks like, Prasad said. But he wants more. The goal is to have Alexa be able to conduct an actual 20-minute conversation.
Amazon has commissioned a grant program, where it’s working with 12 teams of university students who are competing to solve the problem and win a $2.5 million prize.
The Alexa Prize will be selected in November, but examples of the “socialbots” will soon appear in some Amazon accounts, letting consumers converse on “popular topics,” such as entertainment, fashion, politics, sports and technology.
Asked to offer examples of how he uses Alexa every day, Prasad mentions waking in the morning to news and weather on demand, plus a recitation of the traffic patterns and his daily calendar. “It’s taken a lot of friction out of our lives and given me time to do other things.”
For now, conversations with Alexa are done in USA and United Kingdom English (applying local norms and idioms) and German. Prasad said the goal is to expand to other languages, but he didn’t reveal timetables, nor what the next language will be.
Prasad was asked to clarify privacy concerns expressed online by many Amazon customers — what exactly is Alexa recording of our home conversations? Is it picking up entire chats, or just the ones that begin with the “Alexa” wake word?
“Just the wake word,” he said. Amazon’s recorder kicks in when it hears the word, after which the assistant is then programmed to respond and converse.
Amazon says the recordings are stored online to improve the accuracy of results. Consumers can delete them.
Keeping users’ trust as they increasingly share their personal details with Amazon’s intelligent assistant will be key, particularly as Amazon vies with its rivals for share of consumers’ attention.