Alexa Gives Amazon a Powerful Data Advantage

"Hey, Alexa"--a phrase that millions of people call out at home just before telling Amazon their desires at that moment. All those people asking Alexa to order kitchen supplies, turn on the lights, or play music gives Amazon a valuable stockpile of data that it could use to fend off competitors and make breakthroughs in what voice-operated assistants can do. "There are millions of these in households, and they're not collecting dust," Nikko Strom, a speech-recognition expert and founding member of the team at Amazon that built Alexa and Echo, said at the AI Frontiers conference in Santa Clara, California, last week. "We get an insane amount of data coming in that we can work on." Strom said that data had already helped the company make progress on a longstanding challenge in speech recognition known as the cocktail party problem, where the challenge is to pick out a single voice from a hubbub of many people talking.