New Alexa Research on Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Earlier this year, at Amazon’s re:MARS conference, Alexa head scientist Rohit Prasad unveiled Alexa Conversations, a new service that allows Alexa skill developers to more easily integrate conversational elements into their skills. The announcement is an indicator of the next stage in Alexa’s evolution: more-natural, dialogue-based engagements that enable Alexa to aggregate data and refine requests to better meet customer needs.Read More

How to Make Neural Language Models Practical for Speech Recognition

An automatic-speech-recognition system — such as Alexa’s — converts speech into text, and one of its key components is its language model. Given a sequence of words, the language model computes the probability that any given word is the next one. For instance, a language model would predict that a sentence that begins “Toni Morrison won the Nobel” is more likely to conclude “Prize” than “dries”. Language models can thus help decide between competing interpretations of the same acoustic information.Read More

Episode 5: Out of the lab

Hannah Fry meets the scientists building systems that could be used to save the sight of thousands; help us solve one of the most fundamental problems in biology, and reduce energy consumption in an effort to combat climate change.Read More

Episode 4: AI, Robot

Forget what sci-fi has told you about superintelligent robots that are uncannily human-like; the reality is more prosaic. Inside DeepMinds robotics laboratory, Hannah explores what researchers call embodied AI.Read More