Lessons from Alexa: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Use Cases

I was just given an Amazon Echo as a gift and was very excited to connect it and set it up. For those of you less familiar with Echo, it is Amazon's cloud based intelligent agent, which interacts using voice recognition and performs some useful tasks using voice commands. The hardware is a cylinder about 9 inches tall and 3 inches in diameter. The "wake up phrase," and therefore the name of the agent, is "Alexa." After setting it up I walked through some of the features – asking about the weather, setting a timer, listening to a radio station, asking about specific facts (like capitals of states or countries, measures, math problems), asking about local movies, getting an NPR "flash briefing" and a few other interesting functions.