Amazon’s Alexa is about to become smarter and more aware, as the retail giant adds extra smarts to its digital assistant.
Writing on the Alexa Blog, Ruhi Sarikaya – who heads up the Alexa Brain team – has highlighted the need to make Alexa more “friction-free”.
“[We’re] focused on making Alexa smarter and more natural to engage with,” he stated. “Our goals are to make it easier for users to discover and interact with the more than 40,000 third-party skills that developers have created for Alexa, and to improve Alexa’s ability to track context and memory within and across dialog sessions.”
An example of this is the ability to “dynamically arbitrate among skills using machine learning.” What this means in the real world is Alexa having a better understanding of your requests and accessing the Alexa skills you will need to deal with them. For example, if you ask Alexa how to remove a stain from your pants, the digital assistant will access the Tide Stain Remover skill and activate it, saving you from having to search through the Alexa companion app, activating it, then asking Alexa through a prompt like, "Alexa, open Tide Stain Remover and ask how to clean my shirt."
Up next is 'Context Carryover', which aims to get Alexa more on par with Google’s Assistant when it comes to handling two-part requests featuring pronouns. For example, if you ask about Noel Gallaghers' latest song, then ask to play it, your Echo speaker will play the song.
Amazon wants to expand on this though, for other things. Such as asking for a day’s weather forecast in a specific city and then asking what it will be like over the next week, without having to name the city again. Alexa will also remember context if you mix up the command. For example, so you could ask what the traffic is like in New York, and then ask what the current weather is there.
The other evolution Sarikaya mentions is a new memory feature so as Alexa can remember customized things about you and your life. Say you tell Alexa that Greg’s birthday is on November 6th, it will remember that date for you.
“It's early days, but with this initial release we will make it easier for customers to save information, as well as provide a natural way to recall that information later,” he wrote.
These new changes will be rolling out to US Alexa users in the coming weeks.
