Underlying Engineering Behind Alexa's Contextual ASR

This article was published as a part of the Data Science Blogathon. However, we can improve the system's accuracy by leveraging contextual information. Any type of contextual information, like device context, conversational context, and metadata, such as the time the request was issued, etc., could be utilized to customize the underlying ASR model of the conversational agent (Alexa in our case). In this article, we will understand the need for contextual ASR and will also go over how the context vector is created in Alexa and the issues this process presents. Contextual information like the text of a user's request, the history of the user's recent interactions with a virtual assistant, and metadata like the time the request was issued can be used to customize the underlying ASR model to make a context-aware VA.