The Scalable Neural Architecture behind Alexa’s Ability to Select Skills

Alexa is a cloud-based service with natural-language-understanding capabilities that powers devices like Amazon Echo, Echo Show, Echo Plus, Echo Spot, Echo Dot, and more. Alexa-like voice services traditionally have supported small numbers of well-separated domains, such as calendar or weather. In an effort to extend the capabilities of Alexa, Amazon in 2015 released the Alexa Skills Kit, so third-party developers could add to Alexa’s voice-driven capabilities. We refer to new third-party capabilities as skills, and Alexa currently has more than 40,000.Read More