Students at Waterloo working on an Amazon Alexa Echo device
Amazon’s Alexa is one of the most popular voice-controlled artificially-intelligent digital assistants out there, but there’s still work to be done on improving her. That’s why Amazon has set up the Alexa Fund Fellowship, a program for students meant to push forward the technology and the field of audio computing overall.
Through the Alexa Fund Fellowship universities and their students can collaborate with Amazon to set up undergraduate and graduate curriculums around text-to-speech, natural language processing, automatic speech recognition, and conversation artificial intelligence. Fellows of the program will benefit from funding, access to Alexa devices, mentorship, and other perks, before finally showing off individually-made projects at the end of the year.
Pearl Sullivan, Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at Waterloo, one of the participating universities, explained why the field is so attractive:
“Voice computing is no longer science fiction. With our intense focus on experiential learning and early innovation, this program with Amazon will enable our engineering faculty to use Alexa as a teaching tool for artificial intelligence topics on voice recognition and speech synthesis.”
Other participating universities are: Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Southern California (USC). You can check out the original Fellows in the program and the courses they’ll be offering for students at the source link below.
Source: Amazon
