- AMAZON ECHO PLAYS MUSIC AFTER I RATE IT THUMBS DOWN UPDATE
- AMAZON ECHO PLAYS MUSIC AFTER I RATE IT THUMBS DOWN CODE
When Amazon Web Services went down for a few hours, so did Amazon's Echo devices.
The night Alexa lost her mind: How AWS outage caused Amazon Echo mayhem Essentially, this allows the system to take a variety of utterances and treat them as the same command. For example, Alexa has to be able to process "Alexa, tell me the time," as well as "Alexa, what time is it." Most AI handles this problem by ignoring filler words (i.e., is, the, etc) and converting sounds into sound stems and normalized sequences. To increase the usability of Alexa, it has to be able to respond to variations of a given command. We'll come back to the skills in a moment, but for now, let's continue with the challenge of looking up the proper command.
AMAZON ECHO PLAYS MUSIC AFTER I RATE IT THUMBS DOWN CODE
The skills library is Alexa's version of an app store, where outside, non-Amazon developers can build custom code that waits for a certain Alexa command and then executes some behavior. Not only are there the native commands, like reminders and time requests, but there are all the commands associated with Alexa's ever-growing skills library. Once uploaded, the Alexa back-end AI has one very large task: match the sound wave to a specific Alexa command string.Īlexa has a large library of possible commands. The sound wave (or, some compressed representation of it) has to be uploaded to Amazon's data centers for computational analysis. Whether you're asking Alexa for the time, asking to set a reminder, change the thermostat, or demanding " More cowbell," every command or query you speak is, ultimately, just another wave form.Īlthough Amazon hasn't disclosed the exact technical details of Alexa's internal functions, we know the complex parsing problem for all those commands is too much for a local CPU. To do that processing, Alexa relies on Amazon's cloud infrastructure. Parsing all those wave forms is way too much work for the processor on the local Alexa device. How a command is interpretedĪlexa responds to lots and lots of commands. There's also the problem of the internet and Alexa's cloud-based AI system.
AMAZON ECHO PLAYS MUSIC AFTER I RATE IT THUMBS DOWN UPDATE
Given how sensitive Alexa has to be to process wake words, sometimes Alexa will react to a sound (even one we might not hear or notice) and interpret that as a wake word.Īlthough considerably rarer, there's also the possibility that an update changed Alexa's code and introduced a bug. Given all that, the most likely cause of an Alexa spontaneous reaction is a misinterpretation of sound. The likely causes of Alexa's spontaneous reactions On the other hand, if Alexa doesn't respond when spoken to, that would also be very frustrating to users.īuilding a machine learning system that can parse all those variables, achieving a practical balance between too many false positives without seeming to ignore requests, is (and I'll use the phrase again) non-trivial. You can't have Alexa wake up spontaneously, or that would be disturbing.
Given that there are millions of devices, situations, and voices, you can begin to see the challenge that the developers had in making invocation work reliably. Through all of that variety, somehow, Alexa has to determine if it's been woken up by the word "Alexa."
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