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November 18, 2021In Conversation Mode, Alexa detects device-directed speech without the need for the wake word.
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January 21, 2021Amazon principal applied scientist Yang Liu on the frontiers of speech and dialogue.
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November 16, 2020Amazon Scholar Julia Hirschberg on why speech understanding and natural-language understanding are intertwined.
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September 24, 2020Natural turn-taking uses multiple cues — acoustic, linguistic, and visual — to help Alexa interact more naturally, without the need to repeat the wake word.
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May 06, 2020Leveraging semantic content improves performance of acoustic-only model for detecting device-directed speech.
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August 23, 2018Here’s a fairly common interaction with Alexa: “Alexa, set volume to five”; “Alexa, play music”. Even though the queries come in quick succession, the customer needs to repeat the wake word “Alexa”. To allow for more natural interactions, the device could immediately re-enter its listening state after the first query, without wake-word repetition; but that would require it to detect whether a follow-up speech input is indeed a query intended for the device (“device-directed”) or just background speech (“non-device-directed”).