Amazon.com, Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) launch of its first-ever Bluetooth speaker device in 2014, the Amazon Echo, has been widely popular among buyers. Venture Beat reports that the company has been working hard to ensure its digital assistant, Alexa, is going through regular tweaks and updates, making it even better at processing users’ commands and completing goals without any delays or glitches.
The retail giant’s success with Echo has also led it to expand upon its line of Bluetooth speakers, which are now available in the forms of Amazon Tap and Dot. Alexa-powered devices work with voice-commands once the virtual assistant is activated, and have been integrated with almost 1,400 “skills” since last year.
With skills, users can control various aspects of their smart-homes simply through their devices. From ordering an Uber to getting weather updates, paying their bills, adjusting their thermostats, or receiving medical feedback on their child’s health, Amazon has consciously been ramping up on its Alexa skills to dominate markets. Very recently, the company confirmed that it has enabled Alexa to order millions of products simply through verbal commands.
However, while it still does not let Echo users place orders on jewellery, watches, Amazon Fresh, Prime Pantry, Prime Now, we believe that pretty soon the company may come up with a feature to enable these tricks as well.
Vice president of Alexa Machine Learning and Speech at Amazon, Rohit Prasad, confirms that the error rate for goal completion through Alexa has gone down by two. He revealed the news at VentureBeat’s 2016 MobileBeat conference in San Francisco, claiming that Amazon takes cautious measures to ensure Alexa is doing well.
Considering that Alexa serves as the “fourth pillar” for the company, it is highly probable that the recent emergence of platforms like Google Home and Apple’s SiriKit for iOS has further motivated Amazon to perfect Alexa as soon as possible.
This is mainly due to that fact that its tech rivals, Google and Apple, have been working hard to completely eliminate their virtual assistant’s voice recognition error rates as well. With all three tech giants working with artificial intelligence and deep learning, Amazon needs to up its game in order to remain at the top of the charts.
This does not seem to be much of a problem for the company, considering that its recent Prime Day sales revealed Echo’s increasing popularity. Mr. Prasad claims that the company’s event led to Echo’s largest sales to date. Although he did not reveal exactly how many devices were sold that day, it is pretty obvious that digital assistants are slowly becoming a necessity to control a smart-home, and Amazon’s seems to be one of the most popular choices for buyers.
We believe that this has become possible since the company had a decent head start on selling Echo, much before the concept of Google Home and SiriKit even emerged. Therefore, Amazon will not stop until it removes all errors affecting its speech recognition technology.
