It seems as though everyone’s jumping on the AI train because no one wants to be left behind. The latest company to climb aboard is Amazon. The company has ambitious plans to develop a more advanced large language model (LLM) to supercharge its voice assistant, Alexa.
Rohit Prasad, Alexa AI senior vice president and head scientist says: “To continue to meet customer expectations, Alexa can’t just be a collection of special-purpose AI modules. Instead, it needs to be able to learn on its own and to generalize what it learns to new contexts.”
Unlike Microsoft’s Bing, which uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT model, Amazon is using its own LLM, called the Alexa Teacher Model. The endgame is to make Alexa seem more thoughtful, insightful, better at making media recommendations and giving information, while making overall communication more interactive.
Prasad explains that “we are enabling conversational explorations on ambient devices, so you don’t have to pull out your phone or go to your laptop to explore information on the web.”
“Instead, Alexa guides you on your topic of interest, distilling a wide variety of information available on the web and shifting the heavy lifting of researching content from you to Alexa.”
The Alexa team is said to be focusing on three primary areas: dialogue flow prediction through deep learning in Alexa Conversations; web-scale neural information retrieval to match relevant information to customer queries; and automated summarization, to distill information from one or multiple sources, according to Prasad.
Amazon believes that improving the LLM will help achieve Amazon’s ultimate goal of creating “the world’s best personal assistant.”
