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Amazon wants people to hold 20-minute conversations with AI speakers, as if they were human
'Anyone will be able to interact with it effectively'
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Your support makes all the difference.Amazon wants people to have much longer conversations with artificial intelligence (AI) systems in the future.
Alexa is a smart voice assistant, which features on a wide range of products including speakers, phones, TV remotes and cars.
However, it’s currently suited to short interactions, such as straightforward questions and simple requests.
Al Lindsay, the vice president of Amazon’s Alexa Engine, wants the voice assistant to be capable of holding 20-minute conversations with people in the future, reports Yahoo Finance.
“To truly realise that vision, you’ll want a number of things,” he said.
“You’ll want to have it everywhere, be able to talk to it from anywhere, be able for it to do all of the things you would want an intelligent assistant do for you, and ultimately do it in a very conversational way.”
He added: “If we can actually get to the point where it’s truly conversational and equivalent to speaking to another human, anyone will be able to interact with it effectively. You won’t have to learn how to use a touchscreen or how to use an app. You just speak to it.”
Alexa has a number of rivals, including Siri, Google Assistant and Cortana, but is widely considered to be the most advanced voice assistant in existence right now.
That’s largely because the company allows third-party developers to create skills that users can then install and use.
However, an Alexa-enabled speaker recently got a user in trouble with the police, who had to break into his flat after the device started playing music at full-blast in the early hours of the morning
According to its owner, who was out at the time, nobody was around to control it.
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