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.

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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