Rohit Prasad is the vice president and head scientist of Amazon Alexa and one of its original creators.

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Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

00:00 – Introduction
04:34 – Her
06:31 – Human-like aspects of smart assistants
08:39 – Test of intelligence
13:04 – Alexa prize
21:35 – What does it take to win the Alexa prize?
27:24 – Embodiment and the essence of Alexa
34:35 – Personality
36:23 – Personalization
38:49 – Alexa’s backstory from her perspective
40:35 – Trust in Human-AI relations
44:00 – Privacy
47:45 – Is Alexa listening?
53:51 – How Alexa started
54:51 – Solving far-field speech recognition and intent understanding
1:11:51 – Alexa main categories of skills
1:13:19 – Conversation intent modeling
1:17:47 – Alexa memory and long-term learning
1:22:50 – Making Alexa sound more natural
1:27:16 – Open problems for Alexa and conversational AI
1:29:26 – Emotion recognition from audio and video
1:30:53 – Deep learning and reasoning
1:36:26 – Future of Alexa
1:41:47 – The big picture of conversational AI