Rohit Prasad is the vice president and head scientist of Amazon Alexa and one of its original creators.

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Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

00:00 – Introduction

04:34 – Her

06:31 – Human-like aspects of smart assistants

08:39 – Test of intelligence

13:04 – Alexa prize

21:35 – What does it take to win the Alexa prize?

27:24 – Embodiment and the essence of Alexa

34:35 – Personality

36:23 – Personalization

38:49 – Alexa’s backstory from her perspective

40:35 – Trust in Human-AI relations

44:00 – Privacy

47:45 – Is Alexa listening?

53:51 – How Alexa started

54:51 – Solving far-field speech recognition and intent understanding

1:11:51 – Alexa main categories of skills

1:13:19 – Conversation intent modeling

1:17:47 – Alexa memory and long-term learning

1:22:50 – Making Alexa sound more natural

1:27:16 – Open problems for Alexa and conversational AI

1:29:26 – Emotion recognition from audio and video

1:30:53 – Deep learning and reasoning

1:36:26 – Future of Alexa

1:41:47 – The big picture of conversational AI