How Amazon Alexa Uses Machine Learning to Get Smarter

It's fair to say that when Amazon introduced the first Echo speaker in the fall of 2014, most people weren't quite sure what to make of it. In the intervening years, Echo and the broader universe of Alexa-powered devices have transitioned from curiosity to ubiquity. But while you can find Alexa in just about everything--including, yes, a microwave--the real progress Amazon's voice assistant made in 2018 came less from breadth than from depth. That's not to say it hasn't made gains of scale. Amazon's voice assistant has doubled the number of countries where it's available, for starters, learning how to speak French and Spanish along the way.