With both breadth and depth required, how does Amazon promote the internal growth of Alexa?
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Article | Daiso Travel
Report from Leiphone.com (leiphone-sz)
Leifeng.com reported that Alexa has become one of the most important business pillars of Amazon, especially in the field of artificial intelligence voice assistants. It is on par with Google Assistant, Apple Siri, and Microsoft Cortana, and even has a leading position in application scenarios. Therefore, Wired magazine wrote an article detailing the growth process of Alexa in Amazon. Leifeng.com (public account: Leifeng.com) has compiled this article without changing the original meaning.
To be honest, when Amazon launched the Echo speaker in the fall of 2014, most people had no idea what Bezos was up to. In the following years, Echo and a large number of Alexa devices have conquered the market and become everyone's favorite companions.
Although Alexa has been "attached" to almost all devices, this year Amazon's real progress in the field of voice assistants has shifted from breadth to depth.
Of course, it doesn’t mean that Alexa’s growth has hit a bottleneck. The number of its sales markets has doubled this year, and learning French and Spanish is also on the agenda. At the same time, there are more than 28,000 smart home devices that can interact with Alexa, six times the number at the beginning of this year, and the number of products that are deeply bound to Alexa has exceeded 100.
Overall, what really defines 2018 is the secret evolution of Alexa and the way this evolution has driven the release of its potential. Alexa is getting smarter, but this subtle evolution that is quietly affecting many people may not even notice it.
We tried to find out.
"Iron Head"
Since many voice assistants are being improved with the goal of reducing friction, they all use invisible design. In the past year, Alexa has learned to transfer contextual semantics from one question to another. At the same time, users no longer have to shout a "code" to wake up Alexa every time they ask a question, and with just one command, you can ask Alexa to do multiple tasks. In addition, when summoning Alexa's skills, you no longer need to say its name word for word.
Does it sound like just some tricks? You underestimate Alexa. These seemingly small upgrades are guiding Alexa to become a voice assistant that is better at "chatting", which is the real solution to solve problems rather than creating new conflicts. It can be said that now you can chat with Alexa much more smoothly than a year ago.
These upgrades aren’t surprising, as machine learning continues to improve. To reduce Alexa’s error rate, Amazon also uses so-called active learning, where the system automatically identifies areas where it needs help from human experts and makes targeted improvements.
"Solutions like this are delivered to every one of our veins, including speech recognition and natural language understanding," said Rohit Prasad, chief scientist and vice president of Amazon Alexa. "It takes all of our machine learning models to the next level."
Recently, Amazon also introduced transfer learning technology for Alexa. This means that everyone can create their own recipes with the help of Amazon's "Blueprint" skills. Developers can use all the knowledge Alexa knows about restaurants or grocery stores to reduce the tedious work. "Essentially, with deep learning we can simulate various domains and transfer what we have learned to new domains or skills." Prasad explained.
The benefits of machine learning have enabled Alexa to complete an all-round upgrade, but its most far-reaching impact on the entire system is the 25% reduction in error rates within a year. For Echo users, this used to be their biggest headache, but in the future they will no longer have to face it.
Alexa's progress will not stop in the future. This month, Alexa launched a self-learning feature that allows the system to automatically make corrections based on contextual clues. Prasad said: "This is a big deal for AI systems, after all, it learns from implicit feedback."
However, it is not so easy to break through the next barrier, because Amazon wants Alexa to predict your needs at any time. At the same time, Alexa must not only understand what you are saying, but also understand how you say it.
"When two people are talking, they can easily understand the emotional factors emitted by each other, but robots can't do that," explained Alex Rudnicky, a speech recognition expert at Carnegie Mellon University. "So, developers are trying to make Alexa more complex and improve its ability to infer the direction of the conversation."
This fall, Amazon made headlines with a patent that would allow Alexa to recognize your emotions and respond accordingly. But what made Amazon headline news wasn’t the advanced nature of the technology, but the way it listens in, which makes people feel uncomfortable. The way it infers how you feel can dramatically exacerbate your discomfort.
The ultimate goal is for Alexa to have remote conversational abilities, and it might even respond differently to a given question based on how you ask it, Prasad said. But it will probably be some time before you have a voice assistant that truly understands the subtleties of your intonation.
“If you look at the big five emotions,” Rudnicky says, “humans are best at sensing anger in other people.”
Skill Pack
With the explosive growth of Alexa devices, the skills it has mastered are also rapidly increasing. Amazon's official data shows that Alexa already has more than 70,000 skills, whether it is quizzes, games or meditation, it can handle them with ease. Two years ago, this number was only one-seventh of what it is now.
Although Alexa can predict which skills people want to use, prediction is not the same as discovery. At the same time, users have not fully developed Alexa's potential, and most people just use it as a kitchen timer. As a result, developers have no motivation to continue investing in the Alexa platform.
Moreover, Alexa’s prosperity cannot be achieved solely through deep learning. Although it allows Alexa to quickly display the most relevant skills, the potential of voice assistants is beyond those immediate functional needs. The interactive game The Magic Door in 2016 is the best example. If you use Echo just to listen to NPR or check the weather, how will the algorithm remind you of its existence?
“If we introduce new skills and features to users, it can definitely be a very engaging experience for them,” said Toni Reid, who leads the Alexa experience. “But you have to know how to do it because Alexa can be overloaded. We have to do the right thing at the right time, and the volume of content needs to be strictly controlled.”
In addition to continuously adding bricks and tiles to the Alexa building, Amazon also has to be on guard against Google, which started later but is working hard to narrow the gap with Amazon. Market research firm Canalys Research predicts that Echo smart speaker shipments will reach 6.3 million units in the third quarter of this year, while Google has already increased Google Home shipments to 5.9 million units in a single quarter.
However, the competition is not as intense as the sales figures make it seem, because it does not include third-party devices, in which Amazon is the absolute leader. And don't forget that Amazon has accumulated a huge number of loyal customers over the past four years. However, Google also has advantages that Amazon cannot ignore.
"Google has a lot of experience with AI, while Amazon has to start all over again," said Vincent Thielke, an analyst at Canalys. "Since Google's AI is already very advanced, it will be easy for them to catch up." In addition, Android, Android Auto and WearOS can also become the private domain of Google Assistant. On the other hand, Amazon has no heavyweight chess pieces on the mobile side because the Fire Phone has completely failed. In terms of integration with the vehicle's central control infotainment system, Amazon is not a rival to Google and Apple, although they have launched "modification parts" such as Echo Auto.
Fortunately, Alexa has no intention of slowing down, and the new features are making it more all-encompassing. As for where Alexa will go in the future, I'm afraid you can guess a little bit now.
Via. Wired, compiled by Leifeng.com
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