Amazon scientists applying deep neural networks to custom skills

At the Alexa Live event today, Nedim Fresko, vice president of Alexa Devices and Developers, said Amazon is now using deep neural networks to improve customers' experience with Alexa skills. Deep neural networks (DNNs) consist of thousands or even millions of densely connected processing nodes, loosely modeled on the neurons of the brain. DNNs learn to perform tasks by looking for patterns in huge sets of training data. "We are adopting deep neural networks to improve Alexa's natural-language understanding of individual words and sentences," Fresko told the Alexa Live audience. "We've begun applying the technology to custom skills and are excited by the early results."