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Conversational agents are exploding in popularity. However, much work remains in the area of non goal-oriented conversations, despite significant growth in research interest over recent years. To advance the state of the art in conversational AI, Amazon launched the Alexa Prize, a 2.5-million dollar university competition where sixteen selected university teams built conversational agents to deliver the

A challenge for speech recognition for voice-controlled household devices, like the Amazon Echo or Google Home, is robustness against interfering background speech. Formulated as a far-field speech recognition problem, another person or media device in proximity can produce background speech that can interfere with the device-directed speech. We expand on our previous work on device-directed speech detection

Supplementing log filter-bank energies with i-vectors is a popular method for adaptive training of deep neural network acoustic models. While offline i-vectors (the target utterance or other relevant adaptation material is available for i-vector extraction prior to decoding) have been well studied, there is little analysis of online i-vectors and their robustness in multi-user scenarios where speaker changes

Dialog evaluation is a challenging problem, especially for non task-oriented dialogs where conversational success is not well-defined. We propose to evaluate dialog quality using topic-based metrics that describe the ability of a conversational bot to sustain coherent and engaging conversations on a topic, and the diversity of topics that a bot can handle. To detect conversation topics per utterance, we

Amazon Aurora is a relational database service for OLTP workloads offered as part of Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this paper, we describe the architecture of Aurora and the design considerations leading to that architecture. We believe the central constraint in high throughput data processing has moved from compute and storage to the network. Aurora brings a novel architecture to the relational database

This paper presents the design of the machine learning architecture that underlies the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) a large scale Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) Software Development Kit (SDK) that enables developers to extend the capabilities of Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa. At Amazon, the infrastructure powers over 25,000 skills deployed through the ASK, as well as AWS’s Amazon Lex SLU Service. The

In this paper we investigate a time delay neural network (TDNN) for a keyword spotting task that requires low CPU, memory and latency. The TDNN is trained with transfer learning and multi-task learning. Temporal subsampling enabled by the time delay architecture reduces computational complexity. We propose to apply singular value decomposition (SVD) to further reduce TDNN complexity. This allows us to first

We present a zero-shot learning approach for text classification, predicting which natural language understanding domain can handle a given utterance. Our approach can predict domains at runtime that did not exist at training time. We achieve this extensibility by learning to project utterances and domains into the same embedding space while generating each domain-specific embedding from a set of attributes

Conversational agents are exploding in popularity. However, much work remains in the area of non goal-oriented conversations, despite significant growth in research interest over recent years. To advance the state of the art in conversational AI, Amazon launched the Alexa Prize, a 2.5-million dollar university competition where sixteen selected university teams built conversational agents to deliver the

Automatic speech recognition is now playing an important role in volume control and adjustment of modern smart speakers. According to the recognition results by using the advanced deep neural network technology, this paper proposes an efficient processing system for automatic volume control (AVC) and limiter. The theoretical analyses, subjective and objective testing results show that the proposed processing

In this work, we develop a technique for training features directly from the single-channel speech waveform in order to improve wake word (WW) detection performance. Conventional speech recognition systems typically extract a compact feature representation based on prior knowledge such as log-mel filter bank energy (LFBE). Such a feature is then used for training a deep neural network (DNN) acoustic model

The task of automatically detecting the end of a device-directed user request is particularly challenging in case of switching short command and long free-form utterances. While low latency end-pointing configurations typically lead to good user experiences in the case of short requests, such as “play music”, it can be too aggressive in domains with longer free-form queries, where users tend to pause noticeably

We propose a new smart local search for the p-center problem, based on the critical vertex concept, and embed it in a GRASP framework. Experimental results attest the robustness of the proposed search procedure and confirm that for benchmark instances it converges to optimal or near/optimal solutions faster than the best known state-of-the-art local search.

Recent years have seen a surge in consumer usage of spoken dialog systems, due to the popularity of voice assistants. While these systems are capable of answering factual questions or executing basic tasks, they do not yet have the capability to hold multi-turn conversations. The Alexa Prize challenge provides us a great opportunity to explore various approaches and dialog strategies for building a multi-turn

RubyStar is a dialog system designed to create “human-like” conversation by combining different response generation strategies. RubyStar conducts a non- task-oriented conversation on general topics by using an ensemble of rule-based, retrieval-based and generative methods. Topic detection, engagement monitoring, and context tracking are used for managing interaction. Predictable elements of conversation

In this work, we designed a conversational system by combining a finite state method, a retrieval model and a machine-initiative dialogue strategy. By using the machine-initiative strategy, most of the user queries are handled by the finite state machine which models predefined dialogues. If the user’s utterance is out of the range of modeled dialogues, the retrieval model processes the input. On comparative

In this paper we introduce a novel, open domain socialbot for the Amazon Alexa Prize competition, aimed at carrying on friendly conversations with users on a variety of topics. We present our modular system, highlighting our different data sources and how we use the human mind as a model for data management. Additionally we build and employ natural language understanding and information retrieval tools

We present a novel, large-scale ensemble-based system for the Amazon Alexa Prize competition. Our system leverages state-of-the-art methods from deep learning and reinforcement learning. We carry out A/B testing experiments with real-world users and demonstrate that our approach yields substantial improvements over several baseline systems. During the competition semi-finals, our best performing system

Edina is a conversational agent whose responses utilize data harvested from Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) through an innovative new technique we call self-dialogues. These are conversations in which a single AMT Worker plays both participants in a dialogue. Such dialogues are surprisingly natural, efficient to collect and reflective of relevant and/or trending topics. These self-dialogues provide training

This paper introduces the University of Washington’s Alexa Prize socialbot, Sound- ing Board, which is designed to engage users with a wide variety of content. The system models the user utterance using a multi-dimensional representation. A hierarchical dialogue manager is employed where a master manages the overall conversation and a collection of miniskills manage different conversation segments. The