Alexa Conversations, a new deep learning-based approach that developers can use for creating natural voice experiences on Alexa with less effort, fewer lines of code, and less training data than before. Alexa Conversations let's you create skills with more configuration and less coding. Come along to this workshop to learn how to build an Alexa Conversations skill and take skills to the next level with less effort. Attendees will receive an introduction to Alexa Conversations and create a simple skill to get started on your journey. You will also need to create an Amazon Alexa Developer account and an AWS account if you want to follow along.

The ability to provide a natural experience requires not only understanding individual words and sentences, but also the ability to respond to a wide range of conversational phrases and unexpected turns. We are adopting deep neural networks (DNNs) to improve Alexa's natural language understanding (NLU) of individual words and sentences. We've begun applying the technology to custom skills and are excited by the early results: although it will vary by use case, we expect skills that use our DNN-based NLU to realize an average of 15% improvement in accuracy. Even better, you don't have to make any changes to your skill to benefit; your skill's accuracy will improve automatically once included in the rollout. Alexa Conversations (beta) is a new AI-driven approach to dialog management that enables you to create skills that customers can interact with in a natural, unconstrained way - using the phrases they prefer, in the order they prefer – while freeing you to focus on the highest value parts of your experience.

At Amazon's re:Mars conference last week, the company rolled out Alexa Conversations in preview. Conversations is a module within the Alexa Skills Kit that stitches together Alexa voice apps into experiences that help you accomplish complex tasks. Alexa Conversations may be Amazon's most intriguing and substantial pitch to voice developers in years. Conversations will make creating skills possible with fewer lines of code. It will also do away with the need to understand the many different ways a person can ask to complete an action, as a recurrent neural network will automatically generate dialogue flow.

Today, customer exchanges with Alexa are generally either one-shot requests, like "Alexa, what's the weather?", or interactions that require multiple requests to complete more complex tasks. An Alexa customer planning a family movie night out, for example, must interact independently with multiple skills to find a list of local theaters playing a particular movie, identify a restaurant near one of them, and then purchase movie tickets, book a table, and perhaps order a ride. The cognitive burden of carrying information across skills -- such as time, number of people, and location -- rests with the customer. "We envision a world where customers will converse more naturally with Alexa: seamlessly transitioning between skills, asking questions, making choices, and speaking the same way they would with a friend, family member, or co-worker," says Rohit Prasad, Alexa vice president and head scientist. "Our objective is to shift the cognitive burden from the customer to Alexa."

On Wednesday, at Amazon's re:MARS conference, the tech giant announced that it's making Alexa more conversational so the voice assistant can fluidly hop from one topic to the next without you having to call out "Alexa" before each command. Dubbed Alexa Conversations, part of the new rollout of Alexa capabilities includes the option for Alexa to plan a night out for you, according to Rohit Prasad, vice president and head scientist for Alexa at the artificial intelligence event in Las Vegas. Based on the demo of Alexa's upcoming abilities, Amazon is working with several companies to bring the new features to life, including the movie ticket service Atom Tickets, ride-hailing company Uber and dinner reservation app OpenTable. During a display of how the new technology will work, a human voice asked Alexa for Saturday showtimes for the movie "Dark Phoenix." Apple unveils $1,000 Pro Display stand.

Amazon on Wednesday announced Alexa Conversations, a deep learning-based approach for developers to create natural voice experiences on Alexa. The toolset, currently in preview, lets developers build natural skill dialogs with fewer lines of code and less training data, Amazon said. To use Conversations, developers provide API access to their skills' functionality, a sample of dialogs annotated with the prompts that Alexa will say to say to the customer, and the actions they expect the customer to take. Alexa Conversations' AI finishes the job, using the input data to generate dialog flows and variations. "It's way easier to build a complex voice experience with Alexa Conversations due to its underlying deep-learning-based dialog modeling,"said Rohit Prasad, Alexa vice president and head scientist, at Amazon's re:MARS conference in Las Vegas Wednesday.

Amazon on Wednesday announced Alexa Conversations, a deep learning-based approach for developers to create natural voice experiences on Alexa. The toolset, currently in preview, lets developers build natural skill dialogs with fewer lines of code and less training data, Amazon said. To use Conversations, developers provide API access to their skills' functionality, a sample of dialogs annotated with the prompts that Alexa will say to say to the customer, and the actions they expect the customer to take. Alexa Conversations' AI finishes the job, using the input data to generate dialog flows and variations. "It's way easier to build a complex voice experience with Alexa Conversations due to its underlying deep-learning-based dialog modeling,"said Rohit Prasad, Alexa vice president and head scientist, at Amazon's re:MARS conference in Las Vegas Wednesday.

Amazon has admitted that employees listen to customer voice recordings from Echo and other Alexa-enabled smart speakers. The online retail giant said its staff "reviewed" a sample of Alexa voice assistant conversations in order to improve speech recognition. "This information helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems, so Alexa can better understand your requests, and ensure the service works well for everyone," Amazon said in a statement. We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view.