In Recent years, voice activation has become ubiquitous, with Amazon’s cloud-based voice service Alexa a main player featuring on more than 100 million devices worldwide. Beth Holmes, who is principal knowledge engineer on Amazon Alexa, says there are billions of interactions with these devices per week.
Holmes has been with the product since November 2014, when “a small multidisciplinary team launched Amazon Echo, with the aspiration of revolutionising daily convenience using artificial intelligence”. Before that, she was part of the technology team at start-up Evi Technologies, whose acquisition by Amazon meant its natural language AI program became a key component underpinning Alexa.
The statistics are mind-boggling. Holmes provides a screed of numbers. There are more than 200 million smart home devices ranging from lights and plugs to robotic vacuums and grills connected to Alexa. Holmes reckons that “customers are using Alexa every couple of milliseconds...