Amazon Unveils New Alexa Dialog Modeling for Natural, Cross-Skill Conversations

In his talk at re:MARS, Rohit Prasad, Alexa VP and head scientist, said machine learning capabilities are advancing such that Alexa can predict a customer’s true goal from the direction of the dialogue and proactively enable the conversation flow across skills. “With this new approach, Alexa will predict a customer’s latent goal from the direction of the dialog and proactively enable the conversation flow across topics and skills,” Prasad says. With Alexa Conversations, developers provide (1) application programming interfaces, or APIs, that provide access to their skills’ functionality; (2) a list of entities that the APIs can take as inputs, such as restaurant names or movie times; and (3) a handful of sample dialogs annotated to identify entities and actions and mapped to API calls.

Source: developer.amazon.com