Amazon Expands Alexa Fund Fellowship to 18 Universities - Voicebot

Yesterday Amazon announced that it has expanded its Alexa Fellowship to include new programs and fourteen new universities, bringing the total number of participating institutions to 18. Each program has a total of ten universities participating, with Carnegie Mellon University and University of Southern California receiving fellowship for both programs. Amazon is clearly all in on voice. But even one of the largest companies in the world admits it needs help to create better conversational AI solutions. By providing funding, Amazon is giving universities, professors and students the initiative "to solve many hard conversational AI challenges, ranging from automatic speech recognition to natural language understanding to text-to-speech."