Posts in category: Amazon AWS

This Sunday’s Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams is expected to draw more than 100 million viewers, some of whom will have Alexa-enabled devices within range of their TV speakers. When Amazon’s new Alexa ad airs, and Forest Whitaker asks his Alexa-enabled electric toothbrush to play his podcast, how will we prevent viewers’ devices from mistakenly waking up?Read More

Many of today’s most popular AI systems are, at their core, classifiers. They classify inputs into different categories: this image is a picture of a dog, not a cat; this audio signal is an instance of the word “Boston”, not the word “Seattle”; this sentence is a request to play a video, not a song. But what happens if you need to add a new class to your classifier — if, say, someone releases a new type of automated household appliance that your smart-home system needs to be able to control?Read More

Machine learning systems often act on “features” extracted from input data. In a natural-language-understanding system, for instance, the features might include words’ parts of speech, as assessed by an automatic syntactic parser, or whether a sentence is in the active or passive voice.Read More

Developing a new natural-language-understanding system usually requires training it on thousands of sample utterances, which can be costly and time-consuming to collect and annotate. That’s particularly burdensome for small developers, like many who have contributed to the library of more than 70,000 third-party skills now available for Alexa.Read More

Neural networks have been responsible for most of the top-performing AI systems of the past decade, but they tend to be big, which means they tend to be slow. That’s a problem for systems like Alexa, which depend on neural networks to process spoken requests in real time.Read More

In May 2018, Amazon launched Alexa’s Remember This feature, which enables customers to store “memories” (“Alexa, remember that I took Ben’s watch to the repair store”) and recall them later by asking open-ended questions (“Alexa, where is Ben’s watch?”).Read More

At a recent press event on Alexa’s latest features, Alexa’s head scientist, Rohit Prasad, mentioned multistep requests in one shot, a capability that allows you to ask Alexa to do multiple things at once. For example, you might say, “Alexa, add bananas, peanut butter, and paper towels to my shopping list.” Alexa should intelligently figure out that “peanut butter” and “paper towels” name two items, not four, and that bananas are a separate item.Read More

In recent years, data representation has emerged as an important research topic within machine learning.Read More

Language models are a key component of automatic speech recognition systems, which convert speech into text. A language model captures the statistical likelihood of any particular string of words, so it can help decide between different interpretations of the same sequence of sounds.Read More

Suppose that you say to Alexa, “Alexa, play Mary Poppins.” Alexa must decide whether you mean the book, the video, or the soundtrack. How should she do it?Read More