Amazon’s digital assistant, Alexa, is already leaps ahead than its competitors, particularly when it comes to third-party partnerships given the company’s retail background. However, just like Google Assistant, Bixby, Siri, etc, it still has a lot to improve when it comes to the more complicated commands or Skills as it is known in Alexa’s world. According to Ruhi Sarikaya, Amazon’s director of applied science, they are now working on several updates to make the user’s experience “friction-free”.
Basically what they are trying to do is to make Alexa better at handling conversations that aren’t just finished with one command but actually has several steps or layers. For example, they are using machine learning so that it can make Skills suggestions even if you’ve never used it before. Currently, you have to search or the Skill on your own before you’ll be able to use it. Eventually, Alexa itself will be able to tell you what skill you can use to follow-up with an initial question or command.
Another thing they want to improve with Alexa is understanding multi-turn utterances or what they call “context carryover”. It will let you ask follow-up questions without having to trigger a keyword again or even use pronouns. For example, after you ask “What’s the weather like in New York?” you can follow it up with something like “How about on Friday?” It will initially be applicable to the US, UK, and Germany. Eventually it will also carry over to understand different topics/questions.
There will also be a new memory feature for Alexa. It will keep a log of all items so you can ask it “Alexa, remember that XYZ” and it can keep track of any information that you told it to remember. There are no timetables yet for these improvements, but it will probably be soon since they’re already in the beta testing phase for some of them.
VIA: SlashGear
