"Amazon beefs up machine learning in Alexa to predict ‘latent goals’ that aren’t directly expressed"

 Alexa, what am I thinking?

($^&@#!,

 would sir also like me to crush his enemies and salt their fields?

From Seattle's own GeekWire:

Alexa is getting smarter.

Amazon’s voice assistant in the U.S. can now predict “latent goals,” or potential requests that a user doesn’t explicitly ask.

In the example above, when a user asks for the weather at Seaside Beach, Alexa responds with the weather, then asks if the user wants to set a live camera feed of Seaside Beach on the screen.

Or, as described in a blog post, a user could say: “how long does it take to steep tea?” Alexa would answer with “five minutes is a good place to start,” then follow with “Would you like me to set a timer for five minutes?”

Amazon uses a “deep-learning-based trigger model” that analyzes the conversation and past interaction history, among other data, to help Alexa figure out appropriate times to ask these types of follow-up questions.

Early data shows that latent-goal discovery is increasing customer engagement with certain Alexa skills, Amazon said.

This is the latest expansion of Alexa’s conversational capabilities....

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