Amazon Aims to Ace the Chatbots
April 26, 2017
Amazon aims to insert itself into every aspect of daily life and the newest way it does is with the digital assistant Alexa. Reuters reports that, “Amazon Rolls Out Chatbot Tools In Race To Dominate Voice-Powered Tech,” explaining how Amazon plans to expand Alexa’s development. The retail giant recently released the technology behind Alexa to developers, so they can build chat features into apps.
Amazon is eager to gain dominance in voice-controlled technology. Apple and Google both reign supreme when it comes to talking computers, chatbots, and natural language processing. Amazon has a huge reach, perhaps even greater than Apple and Google, because people have come to rely on it for shopping. Chatbots have a notorious history for being useless and Microsoft’s Tay even turned into a racist, chauvinist program.
The new Alexa development tool is called Alexa Lex, which is hosted on the cloud. Alexa is already deployed in millions of homes and it is fed a continuous data stream that is crucial to the AI’s learning:
Processing vast quantities of data is key to artificial intelligence, which lets voice assistants decode speech. Amazon will take the text and recordings people send to apps to train Lex – as well as Alexa – to understand more queries.
That could help Amazon catch up in data collection. As popular as Amazon’s Alexa-powered devices are, such as Echo speakers, the company has sold an estimated 10 million or more.
Amazon Alexa is a competent digital assistant, able to respond to vocal commands and even offers voice-only shop via Amazon. As noted, Alexa’s power rests in its data collection and ability to learn natural language processing. Bitext uses a similar method but instead uses trained linguists to build its analytics platform.
Whitney Grace, April 26, 2017
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