<p>Rohit Prasad is the vice president and head scientist of Amazon Alexa and one of its original creators.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast.</span> If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to <a href="https://lexfridman.com/ai">https://lexfridman.com/ai</a> or connect with @lexfridman on <a href="https://twitter.com/lexfridman">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman/">LinkedIn</a>, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://medium.com/@lexfridman">Medium</a>, or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/lexfridman">YouTube</a> where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/artificial-intelligence/id1434243584">Apple Podcasts</a> or support it on <a href="https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman">Patreon</a>.</p>
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<p>Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.</p>
<p>00:00 – Introduction<br />
04:34 – Her<br />
06:31 – Human-like aspects of smart assistants<br />
08:39 – Test of intelligence<br />
13:04 – Alexa prize<br />
21:35 – What does it take to win the Alexa prize?<br />
27:24 – Embodiment and the essence of Alexa<br />
34:35 – Personality<br />
36:23 – Personalization<br />
38:49 – Alexa’s backstory from her perspective<br />
40:35 – Trust in Human-AI relations<br />
44:00 – Privacy<br />
47:45 – Is Alexa listening?<br />
53:51 – How Alexa started<br />
54:51 – Solving far-field speech recognition and intent understanding<br />
1:11:51 – Alexa main categories of skills<br />
1:13:19 – Conversation intent modeling<br />
1:17:47 – Alexa memory and long-term learning<br />
1:22:50 – Making Alexa sound more natural<br />
1:27:16 – Open problems for Alexa and conversational AI<br />
1:29:26 – Emotion recognition from audio and video<br />
1:30:53 – Deep learning and reasoning<br />
1:36:26 – Future of Alexa<br />
1:41:47 – The big picture of conversational AI</p>