Alexa from Amazon will soon be able to book your night date

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It's the near future of Rohit Prasad, vice president and chief scientist of Alexa, unveiled Wednesday at the MARS Artificial Intelligence Conference of Amazon in Las Vegas. He plans to publish this feature in the coming months. Amazon (AMZN) is currently working with several companies, including Atom Tickets, the Uber relocation company and the OpenTable restaurant reservation service.
The market for voice-activated wizards is booming and Amazon – and its competitors such as Google and Apple – want users to interact with their network in an increasingly natural way. This includes letting them talk as usual, switching easily from one topic to another and using the wizard to make decisions without much back and forth.

Alexa has more than 90,000 voice applications, called "skills" by Amazon, which are generally used one at a time. Yet a videotaped demo showed how Alexa could soon host a party for you – something that Google's Assistant and Apple's Siri can not do yet.

First and foremost, a female voice asked Alexa for the "Dark Phoenix" movie schedule on Saturday night. After some back and forth, the woman settled down and asked Alexa to buy two tickets for a flight at 7:05 pm. show at Regal Cinebarre Palace Station, a movie theater in Las Vegas.

Alexa then did something new by asking the woman, "Are you going to eat at the restaurant near Regal Cinebarre Palace Station?"

The woman asked for a Chinese restaurant and Alexa offered several suggestions. The woman asked Alexa to make a reservation with one of them. After that, Alexa asked if she needed a ride in Uber to go to the restaurant.

Once Alexa booked an Uber, he asked, "Something else?"

"Show me the trailer," said the woman, referring to a preview of the upcoming movie.

Alexa obeys by playing the trailer of "Dark Phoenix" on the Echo Show display.

Today, you will have to talk to Alexa 40 times to carry out this type of complex interaction, Prasad said. But the functionality he's demonstrated has only required 13 user bends and a lot less time, he said.

Now you can order Alexa to forget what you just said
Alexa is already somewhat proactive with features such as Alexa Guard, which allows Amazon Echo devices to listen to suspicious sounds such as broken glass. And you can say things like "Alexa, turn on the lights and play Rihanna" so that the assistant does two things at once. But it's much trickier to create the types of dinner-and-movie scenarios (plus an Uber ride) envisioned by Amazon.

Achieving this type of complex interaction requires a lot of effort in artificial intelligence – Alexa must not only understand and respond to human queries, but also formulate intelligent suggestions that could enrich the conversation. Speaking on stage at the conference, Prasad said that it worked with the aid of an inter-skills action predictor, essentially software capable of responding to commands such as "get me movie tickets" by getting movie tickets and being proactive in acquiring other skills such as a table in a restaurant.

Dave Limp, senior vice president of devices and services for Amazon, told reporters after the morning's conference-debate that the company was working on a few other experiments beyond the night scenario that will also unfold in the coming months. .

"It will take us years to get more and more conversations, but this is very important for us," he said. "The summit of the iceberg."

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