Amazon Uses Self-Learning to Teach Alexa to Correct its Own Mistakes

Digital assistant such as Alexa, Siri, Cortana or the Google Assistant are some of the best examples of mainstream adoption of artificial intelligence(AI) technologies. These assistants are getting more prevalent and tackling new domain-specific tasks which makes the maintenance of their underlying AI particularly challenging. The traditional approach to build digital assistant has been based on natural language understanding(NLU) and automatic speech recognition(ASR) methods which relied on annotated datasets. Recently, the Amazon Alexa team published a paper proposing a self-learning method to allow Alexa correct mistakes while interacting with users. The rapid evolution of language and speech AI methods have made the promise of digital assistants a reality.