A few months ago, Alexa was declared dead. The company had pulled a plug on its'Amazon Alexa' voice-assisted feature succumbing to huge operating losses. But, now the tide is changing. It looks like the unfaltering wave of AI will revive the almost-lost virtual assistant technology. Recently announced partnership between HuggingFace and AWS gives further confidence that Amazon has something up its sleeve to boost users' conversational experience with Alexa.

Machine learning is an application of artificial intelligence in which data is made available to machines so they can learn from it as opposed to having to be trained by humans to think and act in certain ways regarding the data. Every time Alexa or Siri responds incorrectly to your request, they learn from the error and utilize that information to react more accurately the next time. If a mistake was made, it uses that information to make improvements. The system also records if the reaction was favorable. The microphone on the device you are using records your request when you speak to Alexa or Siri.

Alexa AI is co-organizing three special sessions -- themed sessions within the main conferences -- at two major 2022 conferences on speech-related technologies, and two of those sessions are currently seeking paper submissions. At the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), in May, Alexa AI is co-organizing a special session on federated learning, a machine learning paradigm in which distributed computers process privacy-protected data locally, but the results of the distributed computations are amalgamated into a single joint model. At Interspeech, in September, Alexa AI is co-organizing two special sessions, and both are still open for submissions. One session is on machine learning and signal processing in the context of multiple networked smart devices. This session will address topics such as synchronization, arbitration (deciding which device should respond to a query), and privacy.

While you are busy giving Alexa commands to play your favourite song or book an Uber, the intelligent virtual assistant from Amazon is helping the US space agency organise daily tasks while making sense of intrinsic data-sets. According to Tom Soderstrom, IT Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), voice as a platform will become the next big thing once we learn to talk to digital assistants and chatbots in a fashion we do with friends and family. "If you have Alexa-controlled Amazon Echo smart speaker at home, tell her to enable the'NASA Mars' app. Once done, ask Alexa anything about the Red Planet and she will come back with all the right answers," Soderstrom said during the Amazon Web Services' (AWS) public sector summit in Washington. "This enables serverless computing where we don't need to build for scale but for real-life work cases and get the desired results in a much cheaper way. Remember that voice as a platform is poised to give 10 times faster results," Soderstrom noted on the inaugural "Earth and Space Day".

In the hope of making Alexa as life-like as possible, Amazon has introduced new updates to its AI assistant's voice. Alexa can now whisper, bleep out swear-words, add emphasis to words and even be programmed to say regional-specific phrases. The update has been rolled out to devices in the US, UK, and Germany. Amazon's Alexa can now whisper, bleep out swear-words, add emphasis to words and even be programmed to say regional-specific phrases. The changes are to Amazon's Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) – a standardised markup language that allows developers to control pronunciation, intonation, timing and emotion.