From techcrunch.com
Alexa will soon gain a memory, converse more naturally, and
automatically launch skills
Sarah Perez @ / 4 days
Alexa will soon be able to recall information you’ve directed her to
remember, as well as have more natural conversations that don’t require
every command to begin with “Alexa.” She’ll also be able to launch
skills in response to questions you ask, without explicit instructions
to do so. The features are the first of what Amazon says are many
launches this year that will make its virtual assistant more
personalized, smarter, and more engaging.
The news was announced this morning in a keynote presentation from the
head of the Alexa Brain group, Ruhi Sarikaya, speaking at the World Wide
Web Conference in Lyon, France.
He explained that the Alexa Brain initiative is focused on improving
Alexa’s ability to track context and memory within and across dialog
sessions, as well as make it easier for users to discover and interact
with Alexa’s now over 40,000 third-party skills.
With the memory update, arriving soon to U.S. users, Alexa will be able
to remember any information you ask her to, and retrieve it later.
For example, you might direct Alexa to remember an important day by
saying something like, “Alexa, remember that Sean’s birthday is June
20th.” Alexa will then reply, “Okay, I’ll remember that Sean’s birthday
is June 20th.” This effectively turns Alexa into a way to offload
information you’d otherwise have to store in your own brain, and is
reminiscent of earlier bots, like Wonder, which were designed to
remember anything you told it, for later retrieval over SMS or messaging
platforms.
Memory, of course, has also been one of Google Assistant’s more useful
features – so it was time for Alexa to catch up on this front.
In addition, Alexa will soon be able to have more natural conversations
with users, thanks to something called “context carryover.” This means
that Alexa will be able to understand follow-up questions and respond
appropriately, even though you haven’t addressed her as “Alexa.”
For instance, you could ask “Alexa, how is the weather in Seattle?” and
then ask, “What about this weekend?” after Alexa responds.
You can even change the subject, saying “Alexa, how’s the weather in
Portland?,” then “How long does it take to get there?”
The feature, says Sarikaya, takes advantage of deep learning models
applied to the spoken language understanding pipeline, in order to have
conversations that carry customers’ intent and entities within and
across domains – like it did between weather and traffic, in the example
above. It will also require the customer to enable Follow Up mode, which
allows Alexa to continue a conversation even when the wake word isn’t
said a second time.
Natural conversations are also coming “soon” to Alexa device owners in
the U.S., U.K. and Germany.
A third advance arriving in the near future focuses on Alexa’s skills.
These are the third-party voice apps that aim to help you do more with
Alexa – like checking your credit card account information, playing news
radio, ordering an Uber, playing a game, and more. There are so many out
there, it’s becoming harder to surface them just by digging around in
the Alexa Skills Store.
In the weeks ahead, U.S. users will be able to launch skills using
natural phrases, instead of explicit commands like “Alexa, open [skill
name]” or “…enable [skill name].”
Amazon has been working to make Alexa’s skills easier to use for years.
In 2016, Echo was updated to allow users to enable new Alexa skills by
voice, and last year, Alexa began suggesting skills in response to
certain questions in limited scenarios. With the new feature, now in
beta testing, Alexa will instead locate and launch skills for you.
Sarikaya gives an example of this from the current beta test, noting
that he asked Alexa “how do I remove an oil stain from my shirt?”
Alexa responded by saying “Here is Tide Stain Remover,” which is the
name of Procter & Gamble’s skill that walks you through stain removal
for over 200 specific stain types – including oil.
Before, it was hard to imagine why anyone would seek out and enable a
Tide skill on their own, but having it in Alexa’s repertoire now begins
to make more sense.
This could also potentially present Amazon with an advertising model,
similar to Google’s keyword bidding system. If someone asks for
information that could be answered by a skill touting a particular
product or brand, Amazon could eventually have advertisers compete to be
the skill recommended first. (Perhaps the others could be called up with
a follow-up request, “any other ideas?”)
Amazon isn’t giving an exact launch date for any of these three new
features, only that they’re coming soon.
But despite the new launches, Sarikaya notes there’s still a lot of work
left ahead.
“We have many challenges still to address, such as how to scale these
new experiences across languages and different devices, how to scale
skill arbitration across the tens of thousands of Alexa skills, and how
to measure experience quality,” he says. “Additionally, there are
component-level technology challenges that span automatic speech
recognition, spoken language understanding, dialog management, natural
language generation, text-to-speech synthesis, and personalization,” he
says.
“Skills arbitration, context carryover and the memory feature are early
instances of a class of work Amazon scientists and engineers are doing
to make engaging with Alexa more friction-free,” Sarikaya continues.
“We’re on a multi-year journey to fundamentally change human-computer
interaction, and as we like to say at Amazon, it’s still Day 1.”
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David Goldfield, Assistive Technology Specialist WWW.David-Goldfield.Com