Amazon Alexa Brain Initiative chief Ruhi Sarikaya, in his keynote address on Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the World Wide Conference in France, made several revelations about Amazon’s Alexa.
For example, he said, Alexa, in the US for now, would be getting “memory”. With this capability, Alexa can remember any information for the user so that the user will never forget. Alexa will be to store arbitrary information a user wants & retrieve it later. This memory feature is the 1st of the many launches this year that will make Alexa more personalized.
Alexa, he said, was similar to any other Amazon service. It was about “removing friction in our customers’ interactions with the physical & digital worlds.” The Alexa Brain initiative was 1 of many within the Alexa organisation focused on making Alexa smarter & more natural to engage with. The aim is to make it easier for users to discover & interact with the more than 40,000 third-party skills that developers have created for Alexa, & to improve Alexa’s ability to track context & memory within & across dialog sessions.
Ruhi’s speech was updating conference goers on Alexa’s progress against these goals, & outlining the challenges that still exist in making interaction with Alexa more natural.
