Amazon Alexa, also referred to as Alexa, is a natural language processing (NLP) virtual assistant that is used for tasks like music playback, creating to-do lists, retrieving weather information, setting alarms, providing news, traffic and other real time updates. Alexa was developed in Poland and purchased by Amazon in 2013.
The artificial intelligence (AI) powered assistant was initially used in Amazon’s smart speakers like the Echo Dot, Echo Studio and Amazon Tap.
According to recent reports, Alexa has now been equipped with an enhanced speech to speech engine that enables the machine to recognize human emotions and respond with a similar tone. With this new update, the virtual assistant will no longer need to translate speech to text and then convert the text back to speech, as the process has now been unified by Amazon’s Large Text to Speech (LTTS) and Speech to Speech (S2S) technologies.
The report further mentions that Alexa’s voice will be updated to a less robot-like output, giving it the ability to laugh, sound surprised, and exhibit emotions based on the input received.
In June 2023, Incognito Blog reported a privacy violation incident that involved Alexa, read more bout it here.
