Amazon today detailed a capability coming to Alexa called Teachable AI that will enable the assistant to ask questions to fill gaps in its understanding. First announced during the company's September virtual press event, Teachable AI leverages machine learning to determine whether a request can be a trigger for a teachable moment. If Alexa makes this determination, it will ask a customer for information to help it learn. Amazon says Teachable AI will become available in the next few months for smart home devices before expanding to other areas. Scientists at Amazon's Alexa AI research division have long pursued semi-supervised and unsupervised learning techniques, in which AI systems learn to make predictions without ingesting gobs of annotated data.

Alexa will now ask follow-up questions if it doesn't understand a command or order, thanks to the new Teachable AI feature Amazon introduced on Friday. The feature, which Amazon demonstrated during its September devices event, allows users to directly instruct the voice assistant about their preferences instead of manually setting them up on the app or rephrasing the request to work around the gaps in Alexa's knowledge. Teachable AI essentially lets a user program definitions into Alexa in real time with their voice. Whenever the voice assistant doesn't know a reference, it will ask the user to define it. The first phase of the feature is specifically for smart devices like lights and thermostats but will eventually include other kinds of commands.