Alexa is getting better at guessing your intentions

Conversations with your Amazon-brand digital assistant could soon be far less stilted. Following the introduction of the natural conversation feature in September, Amazon announced on Tuesday that Alexa can now infer a user's "latent goals" based on what the person is asking it. That is, if you ask your Alexa "Who's on Saturday Night Live tonight?" or "What time are the 49ers playing Sunday?" the system will not only tell you who is hosting and kickoff time but will also proactively offer to, say, set a reminder alarm or turn on the DVR to record. And while that process appears straightforward to the user, Amazon insists that the actual backend algorithms that drive the feature are quite complicated. The trigger that activates the system and offers a latent goal -- setting the reminder alarm or turning on the DVR -- is trained on a deep-learning model that takes into account several aspects of the conversation's context.