Posts in category: Amazon AWS

Microphone arrays like the ones in Echo devices are being widely investigated as a way to enable sound source localization. Sound reaches the separate microphones of the array at different times, and the differences can be used to calculate the direction of the sound’s source.Read More

On September 20, Amazon unveiled a host of new products and features, including Alexa Guard, a smart-home feature available on select Echo devices later this year. When activated, Alexa Guard can send a customer alerts if it detects the sound of glass breaking or of smoke or carbon monoxide alarms in the home.Read More

Last week, Amazon announced the release of both a redesigned Echo Show with a bigger screen and the Alexa Presentation Language, which enables third-party developers to build “multimodal” skills that coordinate Alexa’s natural-language-understanding systems with on-screen graphics.Read More

If you’re in a room where a child has just fallen asleep, and someone else walks in, you might start speaking in a whisper, to indicate that you’re trying to keep the room quiet. The other person will probably start whispering, too.Read More

A central task of natural-language-understanding systems, like the ones that power Alexa, is domain classification, or determining the general subject of a user’s utterances. Voice services must make finer-grained determinations, too, such as the particular actions that a customer wants executed. But domain classification makes those determinations much more efficient, by narrowing the range of possible interpretations.Read More

Echo devices have already attracted tens of millions of customers, but in the Alexa AI group, we’re constantly working to make Alexa’s speech recognition systems even more accurate.Read More

Alexa’s ability to act on spoken requests depends on statistical models that translate speech to text and text to actions. Historically, the models’ decisions were one-size-fits-all: the same utterance would produce the same action, regardless of context.Read More

To handle more-natural spoken interactions, Alexa must track references through several rounds of conversation. If, for instance, a customer says, “How far is it to Redmond?” and after the answer follows up by saying, “Find good Indian restaurants there”, Alexa should be able to infer that “there” refers to Redmond.Read More

This year’s Interspeech — the largest conference in speech technology — will take place in Hyderabad, India, the first week of September. More than 40 Amazon researchers will be attending, including Björn Hoffmeister, the senior manager for machine learning in the Alexa Automatic Speech Recognition group. He took a few minutes to answer three questions about this year’s conference.Read More

Here’s a fairly common interaction with Alexa: “Alexa, set volume to five”; “Alexa, play music”. Even though the queries come in quick succession, the customer needs to repeat the wake word “Alexa”. To allow for more natural interactions, the device could immediately re-enter its listening state after the first query, without wake-word repetition; but that would require it to detect whether a follow-up speech input is indeed a query intended for the device (“device-directed”) or just background speech (“non-device-directed”).Read More