Rohit Prasad Amazon VP and Head Scientist for Alexa AI - Voicebot Podcast Ep 191

Rohit Prasad is vice president and head scientist of Alexa AI at
Amazon. He joined the Alexa team pre-launch in 2013 as director
of machine learning before moving up to his current role in 2016.


In our conversation, we discuss his long-time hope for Star
Trek-like technologies, his initial impressions of Siri when it
launched, his first day on the Alexa team, the reaction of early
adopters, first-party versus third-party experiences, Alexa
custom assistants, and much more.


Prior to Amazon, Prasad spent nearly 14 years at Raytheon and BBN
before its acquisition by Raytheon as a scientist working on
speech and voice technologies mostly for government-funded
projects. His graduate research at Illinois Institute of
Technology focused on low bit-rate speech coding for wireless
applications back in the late 1990s.