Amazon.com Inc. is enhancing Alexa with new artificial intelligence models that can help users find useful Skills, or apps, to install on their smart speakers.

Alexa Skills are created by third-party developers and provide features not included by default in the voice assistant, such as the ability to control smart lights or tune into a local radio station. There are more than 100,000 free and paid Skills available.

Amazon says Alexa can can now suggest Skills that it believes a user may find handy by inferring “latent goals” from their commands. For example, if a user asks Alexa a history question, the voice assistant might reply with the desired information and then follow-up by asking whether they’d like to download a Skill that can launch history quizzes. When Alexa is asked to find the stock price of a company, it could recommend a financial Skill that can provide additional information on the markets.

Alexa uses several different neural networks under the hood to power this new feature. First, a “trigger model” identifies opportune times to suggest Skills by analyzing user commands and understanding the context behind each request. If the context is determined to be suitable, a separate “latent-goal discovery” model attempts to find a relevant Skill that is related to the user’s request and interests. 

Skill recommendations are generated based on details that Alexa gleans from conversations. “The latent-goal discovery model analyzes multiple features of customer utterances, including pointwise mutual information, which measures the likelihood of an interaction pattern in a given context relative to its likelihood across all Alexa traffic,” Amazon AI researchers Anjishnu Kumar and Anand Rathi explained in a blog post. “Deep-learning-based sub-modules assess additional features, such as whether the customer was trying to rephrase a prior command or issue a new command.”

Alexa uses the information it extracts from customer interactions not only to suggest Skills, but also to hone its recommendation capabilities so it can improve the relevance of suggestions over time. The assist uses an AI technique known as bandit learning to identify and phase out unhelpful suggestions.

The capability is available in the U.S. on launch. Besides making Alexa more useful, the update could also boost the developer ecosystem around Alexa by making it easier for consumers to find relevant Skills and thereby help Skill creators drive more downloads. 

Photo: Amazon