Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI

Rohit Prasad is the vice president and head scientist of Amazon
Alexa and one of its original creators. This conversation is part
of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to
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Here's the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you
should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. 00:00 -
Introduction 04:34 - Her 06:31 - Human-like aspects of smart
assistants 08:39 - Test of intelligence 13:04 - Alexa prize 21:35 -
What does it take to win the Alexa prize? 27:24 - Embodiment and
the essence of Alexa 34:35 - Personality 36:23 - Personalization
38:49 - Alexa's backstory from her perspective 40:35 - Trust in
Human-AI relations 44:00 - Privacy 47:45 - Is Alexa listening?
53:51 - How Alexa started 54:51 - Solving far-field speech
recognition and intent understanding 1:11:51 - Alexa main
categories of skills 1:13:19 - Conversation intent modeling 1:17:47
- Alexa memory and long-term learning 1:22:50 - Making Alexa sound
more natural 1:27:16 - Open problems for Alexa and conversational
AI 1:29:26 - Emotion recognition from audio and video 1:30:53 -
Deep learning and reasoning 1:36:26 - Future of Alexa 1:41:47 - The
big picture of conversational AI