This year at the IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) Workshop, Alexa researchers have two papers about training machine learning systems with minimal hand-annotated data. Both papers describe automated methods for producing training data, and both describe additional...

In the past few weeks, Amazon announced versions of Alexa in three new languages: Hindi, U.S. Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese.  Like all new-language launches, these addressed the problem of how to bootstrap the machine learning models that interpret customer requests, without the...

The first step in training a neural network to solve a problem is usually the selection of an architecture: a specification of the number of computational nodes in the network and the connections between them. Architectural decisions are generally based on historical precedent, intuition, and...

Today I am happy to announce the public release of the Topical Chat Dataset, a text-based collection of more than 235,000 utterances (over 4,700,000 words) that will help support high-quality, repeatable research in the field of dialogue systems. The goal of Topical Chat is to enable innovative...

During a conversation between a customer and a dialogue system like Alexa’s, the system must not only understand what the customer is saying currently but also remember the conversation history. Only by combining the history with the current utterance can the system truly understand the...

This year’s Interspeech will be held in Graz, Austria, whose famed clock tower was built in the mid-1500s At next week’s Interspeech, the largest conference on the science and technology of spoken-language processing, Alexa researchers have 16 papers, which span the five core areas of...

Earlier this year, we reported a speech recognition system trained on a million hours of data, a feat possible through semi-supervised learning, in which training data is annotated by machines rather than by people.  These sorts of massive machine learning projects are becoming more...

This Sunday’s Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams is expected to draw more than 100 million viewers, some of whom will have Alexa-enabled devices within range of their TV speakers. When Amazon’s new Alexa ad airs, and Forest Whitaker asks his...

Many of today’s most popular AI systems are, at their core, classifiers. They classify inputs into different categories: this image is a picture of a dog, not a cat; this audio signal is an instance of the word “Boston”, not the word “Seattle”; this sentence is a request to play a video, not a...