Posts in category: Amazon AWS

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

At the annual meeting of the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics in June, researchers at Amazon and the University of Sheffield released a new dataset that can be used to train machine-learning systems to determine the veracity of factual assertions online. The dataset is called FEVER, for fact extraction and verification.Read More

Last week, the Alexa Auto team announced the release of its new Alexa Auto Software Development Kit (SDK), enabling developers to bring Alexa functionality to in-vehicle infotainment systems.Read More

As Alexa-enabled devices continue to expand into new countries, finding information across languages that use different scripts becomes a more pressing challenge. For example, a Japanese music catalogue may contain names written in English or the various scripts used in Japanese — Kanji, Katakana, or Hiragana. When an Alexa customer, from anywhere in the world, asks for a certain song, album, or artist, we could have a mismatch between Alexa’s transcription of the request and the script used in the corresponding catalogue.Read More

Automatic speech recognition systems, which convert spoken words into text, are an important component of conversational agents such as Alexa. These systems generally comprise an acoustic model, a pronunciation model, and a statistical language model. The role of the statistical language model is to assign a probability to the next word in a sentence, given the previous ones. For instance, the phrases “Pulitzer Prize” and “pullet surprise” may have very similar acoustic profiles, but statistically, one is far more likely to conclude a question that begins “Alexa, what playwright just won a … ?”Read More

To be as useful as possible to customers, Alexa should be able to make educated guesses about the meanings of ambiguous utterances. If, for instance, a customer says, “Alexa, play the song ‘Hello’”, Alexa should be able to infer from the customer’s listening history whether the song requested is the one by Adele or the one by Lionel Richie.Read More

This month, Amazon announced the 11 focus areas of the 2018 Amazon Research Awards.Read More

Amazon Alexa currently has more than 40,000 third-party skills, which customers use to get information, perform tasks, play games, and more. To make it easier for customers to find and engage with skills, we are moving toward skill invocation that doesn’t require mentioning a skill by name (as highlighted in a recent post).Read More