"the following is a conversation with raha Prasad he's the vice president and head scientist of Amazon Alexa and one of its original creators the Alexa team embodies some of the most challenging incred..."

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"successful mission driven team I've been fortunate to be a part of and lead several great engineering teams the hiring I've done in the past was mostly through tools we built ourselves but reinventing..."

"some of the functionalities that are shown are absolutely within reach so the some of the functionality in terms of the interactive elements but in terms of the deep connection that's purely voice bas..."

"infrastructure you're interacting with the device the feeling is okay sure we anthropomorphize things but that feeling is still there so what do you think we as humans the purity of the interaction wi..."

"will be very situational in nature so where is the boundary I think the boundary depends on exact context in which you are interacting what they are so the depth and the richness of natural language c..."

"do you think maybe stepping outside of Alexa broadly as an AI field what do you think is a good test of intelligence put it another way outside of Alexa because so much of Alexa is a product is an exp..."

"do want to be very much like a clear-cut winner be chosen and and it's an absolute bar so did you really break that 20-minute barrier is why we have to test it in a more controlled setting with actors..."

"but the progress is immense like what you're finding is the accuracy in what kind of responses these social BOTS generate is getting better and better what's even amazing to see that now there's humor..."

"getting quite clever on how to really converse and essentially masks some of the understanding defects if they exist so some of this this is not a Lex of the products this is somewhat for fun for rese..."

"but it's a huge progress but coming back to your question on how do the conversations evolve yes there is some natural attributes of what you said in terms of argument and some amount of swearing the ..."

"way for universities to participate so what do you think it takes to build a system that wins the allow surprise I think you have to start focusing on aspects of reasoning that it is there are still m..."

"working to make help these AI advances happen in this case item actually customers they're there quite a bit and there's a skill what is the experience for the for the user that is helping so just to ..."

"also some adversarial behavior to see whether how much do you understand as a social bot so I think we have a good healthy mix of all three situations so what is the if we talk about solving the Alexa..."

"way we are going after it so you have to focus more on learning based on live feedback that is another element that's unique we're just not I started with giving you how you ingress and experience thi..."

"were at that point so and then on a scale of one to five one two three do they say how likely are you or is it just a binary Allah one two five one two five Wow okay that's such a beautifully construc..."

"to be with less data not just less human not just with less label data but also with a lot of week supervision and where you can increase the learning rate I don't mean less data in terms of not havin..."

"right so I think you have to think about it is not a physical assistant it will be in some embodiment as you said we already have these nice devices but I think it's also important to think of it it i..."

"human-like in certain situations Alexa Frye social bot in terms of conversation is a great way to look at it but there are other scenarios where human like I think is underselling the abilities of thi..."

"going to be important from an Alexa perspective I'm not speaking for the entire AI Thank You Marie but from but I think attribution and as we go into more of understanding who did what that identity o..."

"what's what's that researching would look like it's such a fascinating we have some very fascinating folks who from both the UX background and human factors are looking at these aspects and these exac..."

"problem from a product perspective I could see those debates just happening inside of the Alexa team of how much personalization do you do for the specific customer because you're taking a risk if you..."

"customer as a control so I think these are the aspects of what you do like think about where we can use speaker recognition capabilities that it's if you taught Alexa that you are Lex and this person ..."

"so on of Alexa just to see what the answer would be just as a it feels like there's a little bit of a back like there's a feels like there's a little bit of personality but not too much is Alexa have ..."

"of products if you want to create a product that's useful by dangerous I mean creating an experience that upsets me and so what how do you get that right because if you look at the relationships maybe..."

"factor of 10 because as when you're a human interacting with an AI you have a certain expectation either you expect it to be very intelligent and then you get upset why is it behaving this way more yo..."

"has to be that high right so I think that's the trade-off we have to balance but doesn't change the fundamentals that trust has to be own and the question then becomes is are we holding the AIS to a d..."

"to review your data because smile you mentioned supervised so you in supervised learning humans have to give some annotation and that also is now a feature where you can essentially if you selected th..."

"that's a popular anecdote as if something is always listening what can you explain that anecdote that experience that people have what's the psychology of that what's that experience and can you you'v..."

"our customers in this setting and to your other point on like is there something showing up based on your conversations no I think the answer is like you a lot of times when those experiences happen y..."

"to me I as a machine learning person I think it worries me how sensitive people are about their data relative to how empowering it could be for the devices around them how enriching it could be for th..."

"something to keep in mind in these going back to your on what more magical experiences can be launched in these kind of AI settings I think again if you give the control we it's possible certain parts..."

"delightful in the certain settings like follow up more and so forth again this general principle is the same control in the hands of the Castro so I know we kind of started with a lot of philosophy an..."

"that was the first thing to solve by that we mean that you should be able to speak to the device from a distance and in those days that wasn't a common practice and even in the previous research world..."

"device if they're listening to this podcast conversation out loud like what's the probability that an Alexa device will go off because we mention Alexa like a million times so it will we have done a l..."

"next is you're speaking to the device of course you're gonna issue many different requests some may be simple some may be extremely hard but it's a large vocabulary speech recognition problem essentia..."

"daunting so like so we kind of take it for granted that it works now yes right so let me like how first time you mentioned startup I wasn't familiar how big the team was I kind of because I know there..."

"talk about like what would magical mean in this kind of a setting what is good enough for customers right that's always since you've never done this before what would be magical so so it wasn't just a..."

"talked about how also errors are perceived from a eyes versus errors by humans but we are not done with the problems that ended up we had to solve to get it to launch so do you want the next one so th..."

"machine dialogue even those early days even it was very much transactional do one thing one shot a transition great way there was a lot of debate on how much should Alex our talk back in terms of if y..."

"it as music information right so it's all whether it's a part of information right so then we launched we didn't have smart home but within spikes bottom I mean you connect your smart devices you cont..."

"multi-tone experiences on Alexa with no code essentially in terms of the code dialogue code initially it was like you know all these IVR systems you have to fully author if the customer says this do t..."

"purchase of movie tickets from Adam tickets or Fandango or picture anyone then the next thing is do you want to get to get an uber to the theater right or do you want to book a restaurant next to it a..."

"supervision the way desert is let's take an example of a particular song didn't work for you what do you do next you either it played the wrong song and you said Alexa no that's not the song I want or..."

"against I would say it's a spectrum some customers do think that way and some would be annoyed by Alexa acknowledging that or so there's a again no one you know while there are certain patterns not ev..."

"natural how it understands requests is also very important like and in terms of like we have 95,000 skills or and if we have imagined that and many of these skills you have to remember the skin Ling a..."

"Mom's house that's the fascinating problem who's that problem on so the these people create skills uh-huh who's who's tasked with integrating all of that knowledge together so if the skills becomes se..."

"conversational yeah this is this is super exciting because it's not the academic problem of NLP of natural language processing understanding dialogue this is like real world the stakes are high in a s..."

"they'll and we touch this topic a little bit earlier but do you think it'll be a day soon when Alexa can also look at you to help improve the quality of the hunch it has or at least detect frustration..."

"the the point the point I don't think I would say deep learning is enough I think for the purposes of Alexa accomplish the task for customers I'm saying there are still a lot of things we can do with ..."

"so I'm saying there's a huge to do here now and I think customers are you know wonderfully frustrated with things and then I'm gonna keep getting to do better things for that so and they're not known ..."

"through in broad strokes this term I think the five year is where I mean I think of in these spaces it's hard especially if you're in thick of things to think beyond the five year space because a lot ..."

"reviews that kind of stuff so it's repurchase so now you think in even for something that you felt like is is a finite goal I think the space is huge because even products the attributes are many like..."

"that's the hard problem which part the reasoning you know enough to be able to help explore complex goals that are beyond something simplistic that feels like it could be well five years is a nice it'..."

"home that's not human that gets to interact with human beings so we human beings we these descendants of apes have created an artificial intelligence system that's able to have conversations I mean th..."