31 New Features to Unlock More Natural and Immersive Alexa Experiences

The ability to provide a natural experience requires not only understanding individual words and sentences, but also the ability to respond to a wide range of conversational phrases and unexpected turns. We are adopting deep neural networks (DNNs) to improve Alexa's natural language understanding (NLU) of individual words and sentences. We've begun applying the technology to custom skills and are excited by the early results: although it will vary by use case, we expect skills that use our DNN-based NLU to realize an average of 15% improvement in accuracy. Even better, you don't have to make any changes to your skill to benefit; your skill's accuracy will improve automatically once included in the rollout. Alexa Conversations (beta) is a new AI-driven approach to dialog management that enables you to create skills that customers can interact with in a natural, unconstrained way - using the phrases they prefer, in the order they prefer – while freeing you to focus on the highest value parts of your experience.