Amazon details AI that guesses which Alexa skill to launch from vague commands

Alexa somewhat recently gained what Amazon calls "name-free skill interaction," which enables it to parse intent from requests that don't explicitly name third-party voice apps. But as scientists at the Seattle company's Alexa AI research division note, it's more challenging than it seems on the surface -- the AI system that maps utterances to skills (dubbed "Shortlister") would ideally need to be retrained from scratch each time new skills are added to the Alexa Skills Store. Fortunately, they managed to devise a labor-saving alternative described in a new paper ("Continuous Learning for Large-scale Personalized Domain Classification") scheduled to be presented at the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics in New Orleans. It entails "freezing" the settings of the AI model to add new components that accommodate new skills and training these new components only on data pertaining to them. An Amazon spokesperson told VentureBeat it's being implemented in production "on a limited basis" -- i.e., not for all of the roughly 90,000 available Alexa skills just yet.