Amazon Alexa to become smarter, understand more natural language commands and get a memory of its own in the coming months

The Home speakers game is currently going strong and to maintain its upper hand, Amazon is adding some new details to Alexa assistant. [caption id=“attachment_4130123” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Image: Amazon[/caption] Speaking at the World Wide Web Conference in Lyon, France, head of the Alexa Brain group, Ruhi Sarikaya, announced that Alexa will soon be able to recall information that users direct her to remember. In addition to that, Alexa will have more natural conversations that don’t require every command to begin with “Alexa”, that applies to follow up questions as well. This is made possible by what’s called “context carryover”. “The feature, says Sarikaya, is built on deep learning models applied to the spoken language understanding pipeline, in order to have conversations that carry customers’ intent and entities within and across domains – like it did between weather and traffic, in the example above. It will also require the customer to enable Follow Up mode, which allows Alexa to continue a conversation even when the wake word isn’t said a second time,” TechCrunch reports. Also, Alexa will also be able to launch skills in response to the questions you ask, without explicit instructions to do so. Sarikaya also spoke about the company’s focus on improving Alexa’s ability to track context and memory within and across dialogue sessions, as well as make it easier for users to discover and interact with Alexa. As promised, these features are the first of many launches that will come to Alexa this year. Alexa’s ability to remember means that it will be able to remember the questions you ask and retrieve them later, which is another way of saying that Alexa will now be storing your data to be able to pull it out whenever you ask. For instance, you might direct Alexa to remember an important day by saying something like, “Alexa, remember that Ram’s birthday is on 5th June.” Alexa will then reply, “Okay, I’ll remember that Ram’s birthday is on 5th June.” Basically, Alexa can turn into your personal assistant, and the notes are with her, and it’s up to her if she wants to share it with someone else or just keep them to herself. Besides that, something called “context carryover” will also allow more natural conversations between you and Alexa. This is something that is present on Google Home thanks to its Assitant which has been on operation for many years now.