Amazon Beefs Up AI in Alexa, and Gets Charged by EU With Unfair Practices

AI took center stage in recently-announced updates to the Alexa virtual voice assistant, and in the charges this week from the European Commission that Amazon is breaking EU competition rules. During Amazon's Alexa Live event held in July, the company announced a major update to Alexa's developer toolkit that brings AI improvements. Since launching in 2014, Amazon's voice assistant has shipped hundreds of millions of units, which are targeted by a sizable developer community offering voice apps, called Skills, that extend the Alexa default feature set. Just as the Android and iOS large selections of third party applications differentiate those operating systems, so Skill plays an important role in Amazon's growth strategy for Alexa, according to a recent account in siliconAngle. Amazon added deep learning models for natural language understanding that the company said will enable Skills to recognize users' voice commands with 15% higher accuracy on average.