Amazon researchers use AI to improve Alexa's joke selection

What do Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, and Cortana have in common? They tell jokes of varying cleverness, most of which are the work of writing teams operating behind the scenes. They're entertaining, but preliminary research suggests they also play a part in making interactions with assistants engaging. In pursuit of assistants capable of tailoring jokes to individual users' tastes, Amazon researchers investigated joke selection methods that tap either a basic natural language processing model or a machine learning model. They say that when tested against production data, both approaches "positively" impacted user satisfaction and potentially improved joke-telling.