InfoQ Homepage Alexa Content on InfoQ
-
Amazon Is Adding Visual Conversation Builder for Amazon Lex
Amazon is introducing the Visual Conversation Builder for Amazon Lex, a drag and drop interface to visualize and build conversation flows in a no-code environment. The Visual Conversation Builder greatly simplifies bot design.
-
Amazon's AlexaTM 20B Model Outperforms GPT-3 on NLP Benchmarks
Researchers at Amazon Alexa AI have announced Alexa Teacher Models (AlexaTM 20B), a 20-billion-parameter sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) language model that exhibits state-of-the-art performance on 1-shot and few-shot NLP tasks. AlexaTM 20B outperforms GPT-3 on SuperGLUE and SQuADv2 benchmarks while having fewer than 1/8 the number of parameters.
-
Amazon Introduces New APIs and SDKs for Alexa Skill Development
At Alexa Live 2022, Amazon announced new APIs and SDKs for Alexa skill developers, including the Alexa Ambient Home Dev Kit, the Alexa Connect Kit SDK for Matter, Universal Device Commands, and more.
-
Amazon Releases 51-Language AI Training Dataset MASSIVE
Amazon Alexa AI's Natural Language Understanding group released Multilingual Amazon SLURP (SLU resource package) for Slot Filling, Intent Classification, and Virtual-Assistant Evaluation (MASSIVE), a dataset for training natural language understanding (NLU) AI models that contains one million annotated samples from 51 languages. The release also includes code and tools for using the data.
-
Amazon Announces Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 4 Winners
Amazon recently announced the winners of the 4th Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge, a competition for university students to develop conversational AI. A team from Czech Technical University (CTU) won first prize, while teams from Stanford University and University of Buffalo took second and third.
-
Alexa Adds Conversations and Deep-Linking Based Control for Mobile Apps
Alexa Conversations, recently launched in beta, aim to enable the creation of custom skills with fewer code thanks to a new AI-based approach. Alongside Alexa Conversations, Amazon has also announced Alexa for Apps, which allows Alexa users to interact with their mobile phones using Alexa.
-
Apple, Google, Amazon, And Others Team Up to Create New Smart Home Standard
Connected Home over IP is a recently announced, joint effort by Apple, Google, Amazon, and the Zigbee Alliance to define a connectivity standard for smart home products. To accelerate this initiative, Apple has open sourced parts of its core technology for smart home connectivity.
-
Alexa Research Paper Shows Genetic Algorithms Offer Best Solution for Neural Network Optimization
Amazon's Alexa Science researchers published a paper providing a theoretical basis for neural network optimization. While showing that it is computationally intractable to find a perfect solution, the paper does provide a formulation, the Approximate Architecture Search Problem (a-ASP), that can be solved with genetic algorithms.
-
Amazon-Certified Syntiant Neural Decision Processors (NDP) Aim to Bring Alexa to Low-Power Devices
Syntiant NDPs are custom-built chips specialized to run TensorFlow neural networks and can be integrated in many kinds of voice and audio-enabled devices, now including Alexa-enabled devices.
-
Amazon Announces New Cross-Skill Conversational Model for Alexa
At Amazon's re:MARS AI conference in Las Vegas, Alexa vice president Rohit Prasad demonstrated a new conversational model for the Alexa smart assistant. In this new model, Alexa can seamlessly transition between skills and remember the context of the conversation to resolve ambiguous references.
-
Amazon Alexa Enables an Ambient Computing Lifestyle
Alexa is becoming ubiquitous in the home through a purposeful Amazon Web Services (AWS) strategy to make Alexa, voice-activated service, a central component of an ambient computing lifestyle, according to Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior VP of devices and services in a recent article in the Verge.
-
InfoQ Headlines Now Available as Alexa Flash Briefing
InfoQ released an Alexa Flash briefing that tells you the latest tech-news available on InfoQ.com. This flash briefing skill gives you an update on the latest trends in software, and summarizes it in less than two minutes. The skill is available wherever Amazon has English Alexa skills.
-
Alexa Soon to Offer "Newscaster" Voice: Applying Generative Neural Networks for Text-to-Speech
Amazon recently announced the development of a customized Alexa voice, suitable for reading the news. In earlier implementations, text to speech functionality was achieved by concatenating small snippets of audio to produce the full sentence outcome. In the article we will discuss how Alexa can achieve a newscaster voice and how it can be expanded to several other types of voices in the future..
-
Alexa Smart Home Skills Gain Flexibility with New API
The latest update to Amazon Smart Home Skill API, available as a preview, introduces new capabilities that can be used as building blocks to model device settings or features. Additionally, Smart Home skills have gained greater flexibility by enabling the use of custom intents.
-
Alexa Test Simulator Simplifies Alexa Skill Testing
The new Alexa Test Simulator, now available in beta, allows developers to test most functionality in their skills without a device. Additionally, Amazon has announced improved support for automated skill testing.