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Amazon Announces Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 4 Winners
Amazon recently announced the winners of the 4th Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge, a competition for university students to develop conversational AI. A team from Czech Technical University (CTU) won first prize, while teams from Stanford University and University of Buffalo took second and third.
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Alexa Adds Conversations and Deep-Linking Based Control for Mobile Apps
Alexa Conversations, recently launched in beta, aim to enable the creation of custom skills with fewer code thanks to a new AI-based approach. Alongside Alexa Conversations, Amazon has also announced Alexa for Apps, which allows Alexa users to interact with their mobile phones using Alexa.
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Apple, Google, Amazon, And Others Team Up to Create New Smart Home Standard
Connected Home over IP is a recently announced, joint effort by Apple, Google, Amazon, and the Zigbee Alliance to define a connectivity standard for smart home products. To accelerate this initiative, Apple has open sourced parts of its core technology for smart home connectivity.
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Alexa Research Paper Shows Genetic Algorithms Offer Best Solution for Neural Network Optimization
Amazon's Alexa Science researchers published a paper providing a theoretical basis for neural network optimization. While showing that it is computationally intractable to find a perfect solution, the paper does provide a formulation, the Approximate Architecture Search Problem (a-ASP), that can be solved with genetic algorithms.
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Amazon-Certified Syntiant Neural Decision Processors (NDP) Aim to Bring Alexa to Low-Power Devices
Syntiant NDPs are custom-built chips specialized to run TensorFlow neural networks and can be integrated in many kinds of voice and audio-enabled devices, now including Alexa-enabled devices.
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Amazon Announces New Cross-Skill Conversational Model for Alexa
At Amazon's re:MARS AI conference in Las Vegas, Alexa vice president Rohit Prasad demonstrated a new conversational model for the Alexa smart assistant. In this new model, Alexa can seamlessly transition between skills and remember the context of the conversation to resolve ambiguous references.
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Amazon Alexa Enables an Ambient Computing Lifestyle
Alexa is becoming ubiquitous in the home through a purposeful Amazon Web Services (AWS) strategy to make Alexa, voice-activated service, a central component of an ambient computing lifestyle, according to Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior VP of devices and services in a recent article in the Verge.
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InfoQ Headlines Now Available as Alexa Flash Briefing
InfoQ released an Alexa Flash briefing that tells you the latest tech-news available on InfoQ.com. This flash briefing skill gives you an update on the latest trends in software, and summarizes it in less than two minutes. The skill is available wherever Amazon has English Alexa skills.
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Alexa Soon to Offer "Newscaster" Voice: Applying Generative Neural Networks for Text-to-Speech
Amazon recently announced the development of a customized Alexa voice, suitable for reading the news. In earlier implementations, text to speech functionality was achieved by concatenating small snippets of audio to produce the full sentence outcome. In the article we will discuss how Alexa can achieve a newscaster voice and how it can be expanded to several other types of voices in the future..
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Alexa Smart Home Skills Gain Flexibility with New API
The latest update to Amazon Smart Home Skill API, available as a preview, introduces new capabilities that can be used as building blocks to model device settings or features. Additionally, Smart Home skills have gained greater flexibility by enabling the use of custom intents.
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Alexa Test Simulator Simplifies Alexa Skill Testing
The new Alexa Test Simulator, now available in beta, allows developers to test most functionality in their skills without a device. Additionally, Amazon has announced improved support for automated skill testing.
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AWS re:Invent Day 2 Keynote Announcements: Alexa for Business, Cloud9 IDE & AWS Lambda Enhancements
At the second keynote of the AWS re:invent 2017 conference, running in Las Vegas, Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, took to the stage to announce several new product releases: Alexa for Business; AWS Cloud9 IDE; and multiple enhancements to the AWS Lambda service, including traffic shifting, the doubling of available RAM, and a pre-announcement of .NET Core 2 and Golang language support.
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Amazon Alexa Skill CLI and Management API to Streamline Development
Amazon has announced a new API and command-line tool to make it possible to create, update, test, and submit Alexa skills.
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Developing Skills for Amazon Echo Show
The recently introduced Amazon Echo Show provides developers new opportunities to develop skills that integrate voice control, visual feedback, and tactile input. David Isbitski, Amazon chief evangelist for Alexa, summarized the key points of developing Alexa skills for the Echo Show.
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Amazon Lex Now Generally Available to Enable Conversational Interfaces
Amazon Lex, the platform behind Amazon Alexa, is now generally available to create voice-powered chatbots and mobile, web, and desktop apps.