The Sequence Scope: The Alexa Factor

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📝 Editorial: The Alexa Factor

Very few projects have had most direct influence in natural language understanding (NLU) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) research than Amazon’s Alexa. Undisputedly considered one of the top two digital assistants in the world, Alexa is used in highly heterogenous devices from mobile phones to cars. The ubiquitous adoption gives Alexa a unique footprint to apply NLU and ASR methods across different languages, environments and interaction modes. Not surprisingly, Alexa has become one of the top environment for evaluating and deploying new ASR-NLU ideas.

The breadth and depth of NLU-ASR research applied in Alexa challenges is mindboggling. From interactions in low-resource languages, multi-task models to insanely advance methods to improve the quality of speech, Alexa applies hundreds of NLU-ASR models at scale. Just last week, Amazon Research published three new papers about NLU-ASR research applied in Alexa. One of the papers focuses on recognizing intents in unexplored domains which is super relevant to…