Long a useful yet underused feature, Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa, has had the ability to remind users about upcoming events.
The feature functioned as an alarm of sorts that “alerts” the user when a specific time is reached – think: setting an alarm for a future date rather than the next morning. Once the alarm goes off, the clock resets if it is a recurring event.
But Amazon has added a new skill to Alexa’s bag of tricks that makes the feature significantly more useful and Echo devices much “smarter” and more conversational.
Starting Tuesday, Amazon has enabled “Remember This,” a native skill announced last week at the World Wide Web Conference in Lyon, France. Remember This allows users to ask Alexa to remember important information that may be recalled in the future.
Amazon Echo Dot
“With this capability, Alexa can remember any information for you so that you never forget. Alexa can store arbitrary information you want and retrieve it later,” Ruhi Sarikaya, head of the Alexa Brain group, wrote in blog post. “It’s early days, but with this initial release, we will make it easier for customers to save information, as well as provide a natural way to recall that information later.”
Need to remember mom’s birthday? “Alexa, remember that mom’s birthday is on Jan. 21.”
How about your anniversary? “Alexa, remember our anniversary is Aug. 29.”
Users can then query the information they asked Alexa to remember at any time. “Alexa, when is mom’s birthday?”
The skill does not need to be enabled, and should be rolling out to U.S. customers in the coming days. The new functionality is the next step in Alexa’s evolution to become more intuitive, conversational and “friction-free.”
Also announced at the World Wide Web Conference that Alexa will soon understand conversational questions when asked back-to-back. Users, for example, will be able to ask, “Alexa, how’s the weather in Raleigh?” and then follow-up, “What about this weekend?” or “How long does it take to get there?”
“Soon, we will improve our understanding of multi-turn utterances, or what we refer to as context carryover,” Sarikaya wrote. “We are providing this more natural way of engaging with Alexa by adding deep learning models to our spoken language understanding pipeline that allows us to carry customers’ intent and entities within and across domains (i.e., between weather and traffic).”
Amazon has not announced when its context carryover will be made available, but Sarikaya said it will be initially available to customers in the U.S., U.K. and Germany.
“We have many challenges still to address, such as how to scale these new experiences across languages and different devices,” Sarikaya wrote. “Additionally, there are component-level technology challenges that span automatic speech recognition, spoken language understanding, dialog management, natural language generation, text-to-speech synthesis, and personalization.”
