Future of Alexa's AI and memory

[EcoJacobs]

Hello,

I am new to Alexa and AI.  We have had her (I am find it fun to anthropomorphize) for about 3 weeks now.  I am generally impressed by the voice recognition software.  She seems to understand me when I am careful with my pronunciation.  In her own ways, she is very useful (music, news, weather, etc.), but I am now starting to see her limitations in terms of effective memory and the ability to have conversations.  I stumbled across the SDK website and see the investment plans ($100M), so it appears that there is an active group developing her further, so it will be interesting to see how she evolves with time.

Right now, it is interesting to see how people are making her control more of their houses functions, etc.  This for me is not too useful, though I can see how it would be great for people with disabilities.  What intrigues me is how her AI will evolve and trying to further understand the program hierarchy and infrastructure behind Alexa.  Also, the SDK is interesting, as it seems to work at a remote server level as a set of subroutines (please correct me if I have it wrong - I am still learning...)  that are activated using keywords.  These are nice, but definitely do not add to the illusion of a conversation with an AI/chatbot.  It seems that only mods made to her main program over at Amazon can do this.  I am guessing that the Amazon developer folks will most likely add similar routines over time to ones that SDK folks are developing now, but just looking at the forums posts to date show that the ability to add things (like nest) seems to involve workarounds that make it kinda clunky to use.

I see that they have already (or are preparing to) separated her application from the Echo speaker (can run her elsewhere).  It seems that her job in my house would be well regarded as a personal assistant of sorts, if she could remember who I am and also the rest of my family.  I think it would be also interesting to see features integrated into her that made her more like a chatbot.  Anyone know Amazons plans?  Are there any publications out there that talk about Amazons vision for Alexa's future or the basic programming setup of Alexa?

Thanks,

Eco       

[roadbug]

The way I am looking at this is the Echo is just the beginning.  You have to start somewhere and everyone is trying to come up with, for lack of a better analogy, the Star Trek ship computer.  You speak to it and it replies or does what you want.  The basic problem is how do you implement that?  Is there more than one way to implement it?  Apple has Siri, Microsoft has Cortana, but they do things slightly differently and besides you need to tap a button to get it to work.  Amazon has opened up their API to make it easier for everyone who wants to to make it happen.  Probably good and bad in that but at least by doing so Amazon has shown that the way to get to were we want to be is not just their way. This will grow and evolve to meet the needs of those who use it.  Think about how Echo started and what it could do and what it can do now in such a short time.