INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Image copyrightWeb SummitImage caption
Rohit Prasad is responsible for the machine learning capabilities that power
Alexa
Rohit Prasad has 17 smart speakers in his home powered by Amazon's smart assistant."I test my own technology - with
all of them being called Alexa, I see which one is waking up and whether it is the right device," says the chief scientist of the AI
division responsible for the tech.That's a lot of Alexa
But, it seems, still not enough.In a one-on-one interview with the TheIndianSubcontinent, Mr Prasad discussed plans for Alexa to both become
smarter and to follow users wherever they go
This is known in the trade as ubiquitous ambient computing, and Amazon hopes to corner the market.In the US, it already sells an Echo system
that plays Alexa through a car's speakers
And Mr Prasad says he also wants the virtual assistant to accompany users as they walk about too
To achieve this, he explains, the tech needs to get better at contextual reasoning."If you are in a store and you say, 'Where are the
tomatoes?' it will need to have the context," he says."You are actually looking for the aisle so it may need a store map."Or if you are in a
hotel room and you ask for the swimming pool hours, it should give you the hours for the hotel and not the community pool."To pursue this
goal, the firm recently launched its own Alexa-enabled earbuds and is testing other wearables including glasses and even a ring with select
customers.Image copyrightAmazonImage caption
Amazon recently unveiled the Echo Loop, a smart ring that brings Alexa to
the hand
The more users Alexa attracts and the more time they spend chatting to it, the more data Mr Prasad's team and the
training algorithms involved can draw on to make improvements.There are, he says "hundreds of millions" of devices worldwide already taking
billions of requests each week from customers
He adds that Alexa now offers 100,000-plus skills - its version of apps - and can communicate with other smart products from more than 9,500
brands.And it seems Amazon is getting the upper hand
According to market research firm Canalys, Amazon's smart speakers outsold Google's by nearly three-to-one worldwide in the last quarter
Moreover, it said Amazon's sales were still accelerating while Google's had slumped.Gender choiceGoogle, of course, benefits from the fact
that its assistant is baked into Android, meaning handset owners are already using it across their daily lives.But in the contest to offer
the smartest smart assistant, Mr Prasad says Alexa is evolving at a rapid pace."All of these components have become smarter by four times in
terms of what our error rate was in 2014 to now," he says.The figure, he says, is based on accurate handling of four common tasks:waking up
to the chosen trigger word - Alexa, Amazon, Echo or Computerspeech recognition, which converts spoken commands into text before it is
processedlanguage understanding, which involves making sense of context and the various ways words spoken by users can be arranged in
sentencestext-to-speech synthesis, which is used to provide Alexa's responses in its distinctive female accentAmazon is about to let users
buy alternative celebrity voices for Alexa, starting with that of the actor Samuel L Jackson.Media playback is unsupported on your
deviceMedia captionWATCH: Amazon Alexa gets Samuel L Jackson's voiceBut will it ever give users the choice of having a default voice that
isn't female? In other words, letting owners chat to Alex rather than Alexa? Gender-neutral AI is, Mr Prasad says, a "very hot topic"."This
is a debate we have every few months
It is not just about gender, but about Alexa's voice and choice of words," he adds."We wanted a personality that was very relatable to our
customers.""If we felt that there has to be another gender for Alexa, well we'd also have to think what would the wake word be, because its
personality and gender all sort of go together and you have to think about overall personality, not just gender."Testing trustDespite all
the work that's been done on Alexa, tales of "fails" persist
Amazon had to act to curb a spontaneous creepy laugh reported by users last year, while reports persist of it struggling with some
accents.According to Martin Garner, an analyst at research firm CCS Insight, Alexa's capabilities may have "moved on a lot over the last two
years but smart assistant voice services have the effect of raising people's expectations very rapidly too"."All providers are racing as
fast as possible to extend the range of questions they can answer," he added.Users also need to feel they can trust Amazon if they are to
surround themselves with its microphones
And that confidence was recently challenged after revelations that the firm was using third-party contractors working from home to listen
back and label recordings.Amazon has since made it easier to opt out of the process, but Mr Prasad says it has no plans to drop human-based
checks.Image copyrightReutersImage caption
Amazon wants Alexa to become the go-to means to control appliances across our
homes and workplaces
"Supervised learning is a key aspect, where humans label a very small fraction - actually less than 1%
- of the data that goes though Alexa," he said."We are making it much easier to delete but also by bringing the convenience of voice
You can say, 'Alexa tell me what you heard,' and if you're uncomfortable with what is was, you can delete it."But some have questioned this
"easy option", pointing out that in order to exclude themselves users have to locate a setting buried several menus deep on the Alexa app
and Amazon's website.New etiquette?Even if many consumers make an active choice to have Alexa in their lives, others may be unhappy at
having their voices picked up.Last month, Google's devices chief Rick Osterloh told the TheIndianSubcontinent that he informs guests to his
home that smart speakers are in use before they enter.But Mr Prasad says he does not believe there's a need for such etiquette to become
widespread.Image copyrightAmazonImage caption
Some Echo products include a camera as well as microphones
"It's very important to realise that the devices don't listen for anything but Alexa, the wake word," he says."We have to be clear about
that in terms of what detection means."You can mute the button on the device
And Alexa is quite transparent when it is streaming to the cloud because the blue lights come on."Even so, as Alexa is added to more devices
and becomes more omnipresent there's a question about how obvious this will always be.
