In May 2018, Amazon launched Alexa’s Remember This feature, which enables customers to store “memories” (“Alexa, remember that I took Ben’s watch to the repair store”) and recall them later by asking open-ended questions (“Alexa, where is Ben’s watch?”).Read More
How Alexa Knows “Peanut Butter” Is One Shopping-List Item, Not Two
At a recent press event on Alexa’s latest features, Alexa’s head scientist, Rohit Prasad, mentioned multistep requests in one shot, a capability that allows you to ask Alexa to do multiple things at once. For example, you might say, “Alexa, add bananas, peanut butter, and paper towels to my shopping list.” Alexa should intelligently figure out that “peanut butter” and “paper towels” name two items, not four, and that bananas are a separate item.Read More
With New Data Representation Scheme, Alexa Can Better Match Skills to Customer Requests
In recent years, data representation has emerged as an important research topic within machine learning.Read More
New Approach to Language Modeling Reduces Speech Recognition Errors by Up to 15%
Language models are a key component of automatic speech recognition systems, which convert speech into text. A language model captures the statistical likelihood of any particular string of words, so it can help decide between different interpretations of the same sequence of sounds.Read More
Distributed “Re-Ranker” Ensures That Alexa Improvements Reach Customers ASAP
Suppose that you say to Alexa, “Alexa, play Mary Poppins.” Alexa must decide whether you mean the book, the video, or the soundtrack. How should she do it?Read More
Faster Neural Networks Straight from JPEG
Neural networks, an important tool for processing data in a variety of industries, grew from an academic research area to a cornerstone of industry over the last few years. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been particularly useful for extracting information …
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The role of context in redefining human-computer interaction
In the past few years, advances in artificial intelligence have captured our imaginations and led to the widespread use of voice services on our phones and in our homes.Read More
AlphaZero: Shedding new light on chess, shogi, and Go
In late 2017 we introduced AlphaZero, a single system that taught itself from scratch how to master the games of chess, shogi (Japanese chess), and Go, beating a world-champion program in each case. We were excited by the preliminary results and thrilled to see the response from members of the chess community, who saw in AlphaZeros games a ground-breaking, highly dynamic and unconventional style of play that differed from any chess playing engine that came before it.Today, we are delighted to introduce the full evaluation of AlphaZero, published in the journal Science(Open Access version here), that confirms and updates those preliminary results. It describes how AlphaZero quickly learns each game to become the strongest player in history for each, despite starting its training from random play, with no in-built domain knowledge but the basic rules of the game.Read More
Context-Aware Deep-Learning Method Boosts Alexa Dialogue System’s Ability to Recognize Conversation Topics by 35%
Conversational-AI systems have traditionally fallen into two categories: goal-oriented systems, which help users fulfill requests, and chatbots, which carry on informative or entertaining conversations.Read More