Alexa

Amazon, Apple, and Google have been building chatbots for years. So how did they let the alliance between Microsoft and OpenAI integrate the first smash-hit bot into Microsoft products?

Too exhausted (or unimaginative) to tell your child a bedtime story? Amazon’s smart displays can spin bespoke tales on demand. A feature called Create with Alexa generates children’s stories complete with illustrations, music, and sound effects on the Amazon Echo Show device.

An Android app offers speech recognition model for speech impaired by cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, stroke, or traumatic brain injury.

Chatbots often respond to human input with incorrect or nonsensical answers. Why not enable them to search for helpful information?

Amazon unveiled a robot that patrols users’ homes, scopes out strangers, and warns of perceived dangers.

Neural networks for natural language processing got bigger, more prolific, and more fun to play with. Language models, which already had grown to gargantuan size, continued to swell, yielding chatbots that mimic AI luminaries and have very strange ideas about horses.

Amazon’s digital assistant is using its eyes as well as its ears to figure out who’s talking. At its annual hardware showcase, Amazon introduced an Alexa skill that melds acoustic, linguistic, and visual cues to help the system keep track of individual speakers and topics of conversation.

Conversational agents have a tough job following the zigs and zags of human conversation. They’re getting better at it — thanks to yesterday’s technology. Amazon recently improved the Alexa chatbot’s ability to identify the current topic of conversation.