Today Amazon announced a new feature called Alexa Dialog Modeling for developers for cross-skill conversations. In the past when you talked to Alexa you would be looked into one skill at a time. Now Amazon is adding the ability to jump between skills to easily book buy movie tickets, reserve a ride, and make dinner reservations all from in a single conversation with Alexa.
“Today we’re excited to announce Alexa Conversations, a new deep learning-based approach that developers can use for creating natural voice experiences on Alexa with less effort, fewer lines of code, and less training data than before. This new model helps developers create natural, flexible dialogs within a single skill and in the upcoming releases brings multiple skills into a single conversation. Alexa Conversations is now available in developer preview in the US. Apply for the preview here.”
“We envision a world where customers will converse more naturally with Alexa: seamlessly transitioning between skills, asking questions, making choices, and speaking the same way they would with a friend, family member, or co-worker,” says Rohit Prasad, Alexa vice president and head scientist. “Our objective is to shift the cognitive burden from the customer to Alexa.”
“With this new approach, Alexa will predict a customer’s latent goal from the direction of the dialog and proactively enable the conversation flow across topics and skills,” Prasad says. “This is a big leap for conversational AI.”
“It’s way easier to build a complex voice experience with Alexa Conversations due to its underlying deep-learning-based dialog modeling,” Prasad said.
Developers will still need to build in support for Alexa Conversations but when they do soon your Alexa will be far more natural to talk with.
Update: We updated the post to make it more clear that Alexa Conversations was released for developers today.
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