Alexa is Implementing Self-Learning Techniques To Better Understand Users

In a developer blog post published this week, Alexa AI director of applied science Ruhi Sarikaya detailed the advances in machine learning technologies that have allowed Alexa to better understand users through contextual clues. From a report: According to Sarikaya, these improvements have played a role in reducing user friction and making Alexa more conversational. Since this fall, Amazon has been working on self-learning techniques that teach Alexa to automatically recover from its own errors. The system has been in beta until now, and it launched in the US this week. It doesn't require any human annotation, and, according to Sarikaya, it uses customers' "implicit or explicit contextual signals to detect unsatisfactory interactions or failures of understanding."

The contextual signals range from customers' historical activity, preferences, and what Alexa skills they use to where the Alexa device is located in the home and what kind of Alexa device it is. For example, during the beta phase, Alexa learned to understand a customer's mistaken command of "Play 'Good for What'" and correct them by playing Drake's song "Nice for What."

so it learned to reboot, cache queries..

[Anonymous Coward]

and 'google'.

wow.. that's some 'machine learning'.

Re:

[mermeid007]

I missed that beta testing period. I just tell Alexa to play music. She plays it too loud and the police get called. Oh well.

If Alexa can learn like that

[bobstreo]

tossing in the option of a camera to read sign language for the deaf would be interesting.

Finally, Al for real, not the fake stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is not artificial life I don't know what is.

Finally, people are starting to realize...

[Anonymous Coward]

That products like these are not to help people, that is an (un)intended consequence, but
a paid-for-by-the-consumer experiment for data collection and group analysis for control.
This is not a tin-foil hat theory. Think about it, they known everything about you in your home --
SPL, temperature, ambient light, how often you (and your children) have visitors), and
background noise (yes, that background noise as well) to name a few.

Do they operate as a smoke detector as well? Thought so...

Do you really want to

All the better to eat you with

[MrKaos]

Come closer my dear... so I can better understand you.

First mover advantage

[melted]

Google Home AI is better by a mile: better speech recognition, language understanding (you mostly can just say things without adhering to a rigid syntax), and speech synthesis, better music service and question answering, too. Yet people treat Alexa as though it’s extraordinary in some way other than being the first on the market.

Re:

[mermeid007]

I tried google home AI once. It sounded possessed.

Re:

[N1AK]

Alexa has a combination of first mover and scale going for it which means it gets a lot of press coverage, but I've seen very little that implies it's extraordinary. To be fair to Amazon, if they have found genuinely effective way to have Alexa learn to interpret users "incorrect" commands or commands where it didn't deliver the desired response, and respond to that then this is quite an improvement. People don't want to have to use rigid command structures to interact, and from my limited experience with A

Re:

[omnichad]

I've tried both. On the low end - Home Mini vs Dot - the Echo device wins by a mile on hearing its wake word in a noisy room while music is playing and still picking up what you want to say. Plus they have audio out to better speakers. Even still, it's useless compared to a Google Home product on what it can actually do.

4 year old using Alexa

[Danathar]

Good luck AI. My son loves to just play with Alexa, half the time Alexa can't understand him.

To repeat my old mantra.

[Oligonicella]

I do not want a 'relationship' with my machinery. Relationships involve intimacy and I don't want intimacy with Amazon, Google, et al. They may have my clicks and typed in text I use to get what I want but they don't need to figure out if others live with me, what I talk about when they're "not listening" or anything further. Camera feed? Fucking hell no.

Thank God!

[cascadingstylesheet]

For example, during the beta phase, Alexa learned to understand a customer's mistaken command of "Play 'Good for What'" and correct them by playing Drake's song "Nice for What."

Thank God! We were all waiting on tenterhooks for that problem to be solved!

Re:

[stealth_finger]

And what if "good for what" is what they wanted? The top result on a google search of good for what was a music video called that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Better advertise to

[stealth_finger]

To better advertise to more like.

learning

[Dale512]

My youngest (4) has some speech issues. She has been making improvements and Alexa has been making improvements. She can now trigger the Amazon devices on demand which has made her happy. I change the trigger word for her lamp each week to one of the words she is working in her school program for her speech. My two kids call their cousins, my parents, and even my grandparents and that makes the extended family very happy. We get a ton of use out of the devices even with the privacy and data issues.

Sign it still has a long way to go....

[kaizendojo]

Try asking it to clear your notifications. **EVERY TIME** she will ask you, "Delete all your notifications, right?" I understand it's to kep noobs from accidentally deleting all their notification but If I have answered "Yes" for a solid year, it really should be smart enough to stop asking. After the 100th plus time, it should have said, "I see you want this to be your default - I won't ask again. If you want to change this, go into settings etc." This is a simple, localized branch and should be a kno

Alexa's issue

[Stonent1]

is the never ending "Hmm, I'm not sure" on things that the google assistant has no problem doing. I get so much "Hmm, I'm not sure" from Alexa I wonder how it's a real "assistant" product. It seems fine for turning lights off and on (if I had that setup) and the sound quality is pretty good, but answering questions is it's weakest point.