Alexa

8 Posts

Speech bubble surrounded by Amazon, Google and Apple logos
Alexa

How AI Kingpins Lost the Chatbot War: Why Microsoft beat other tech giants to market on generative AI

Amazon, Apple, and Google have been building chatbots for years. So how did they let the alliance between Microsoft and OpenAI integrate the first smash-hit bot into Microsoft products?
Different screenshots of Create with Alexa feature displayed on a tablet
Alexa

How Alexa Says Goodnight: Amazon Echo uses generative AI to create bedtime stories.

Too exhausted (or unimaginative) to tell your child a bedtime story? Amazon’s smart displays can spin bespoke tales on demand. A feature called Create with Alexa generates children’s stories complete with illustrations, music, and sound effects on the Amazon Echo Show device.
Animated graphics from Google demonstrate Project Relate, a tool for recognizing impaired speech. .
Alexa

Everyone Has a Voice: Project Relate Offers Synthesized Speech that Works in Real Time

An Android app offers speech recognition model for speech impaired by cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, stroke, or traumatic brain injury.
Example comparing a nonaugmented model (left) to a model with internet-augmentation (right)
Alexa

This Chatbot Does Its Research: Facebook Chatbot Uses the Internet to Inform its Answers

Chatbots often respond to human input with incorrect or nonsensical answers. Why not enable them to search for helpful information?
GIF showing Amazon Housold Robot working
Alexa

Guard Bot: Amazon Household Robot Patrols Home for Intruders

Amazon unveiled a robot that patrols users’ homes, scopes out strangers, and warns of perceived dangers.
Bookstack and wrapping paper
Alexa

Writer’s Unblock: Language models keep getting bigger and better.

Neural networks for natural language processing got bigger, more prolific, and more fun to play with. Language models, which already had grown to gargantuan size, continued to swell, yielding chatbots that mimic AI luminaries and have very strange ideas about horses.
Alexa device and information about its new skill called natural turn-talking
Alexa

Alexa, Read My Lips: Amazon Alexa uses visual clues to determine who is talking.

Amazon’s digital assistant is using its eyes as well as its ears to figure out who’s talking. At its annual hardware showcase, Amazon introduced an Alexa skill that melds acoustic, linguistic, and visual cues to help the system keep track of individual speakers and topics of conversation.
Illustration of Amazon Alexa with a question mark inside of a thought bubble
Alexa

What Were We Talking About?: How Amazon's Alexa keeps up with conversations

Conversational agents have a tough job following the zigs and zags of human conversation. They’re getting better at it — thanks to yesterday’s technology. Amazon recently improved the Alexa chatbot’s ability to identify the current topic of conversation.

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