Shiv Vitaladevuni, December 2, 2016, Amazon

Friday, December 2, 2016, 3-4pm
8 St. Mary’s Street, PHO 210
Refreshments at 2:45pm

Shiv Vitaladevuni
Amazon

Building Alexa

Amazon launched Echo, a household conversational device, which allows users to interact via voice with Alexa, including asking questions and issuing commands to play music, control home appliances, etc. A key tenet is to enable hands free, eyes free interaction. Over the last two years, Amazon Echo has gained increasing popularity and expanded capabilities. We will describe some of the speech, language and machine learning research that went into building Alexa and how we are expanding her capabilities.

Shiv Vitaladevuni is a Senior Manager in Machine Learning at Amazon Alexa, focusing on R&D for Alexa family of devices such as Echo, Dot, Tap, FireTV, etc. His team develops features for Alexa such as wake word, spoken language understanding for Shopping, and making Alexa more conversational via dialog modeling. Prior to Amazon, Shiv worked on video and text document analysis at Raytheon BBN Tecnologies, and bio-medical image analysis at Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Faculty Host: Venkatesh Saligrama
Student Host: Andrew Cutler