Reducing Defects in Assistant Commands

We need much better interpretation of commands, in context.     Alexa has failed in this from the beginning.     Now word it will do much better?  But can we greatly improve the intelligence in context?  Else simple errors of language processing,  common sense and lack of integrated goals can quickly bury the conversational interaction.  Have yet to see significant improvement, awaiting it.

Amazon’s AI rewrites ‘millions’ of Alexa user commands to reduce defects by 30%
By Kyle Wiggers  in Venturebeat

The AI underlying assistants like Alexa gets better in part through manual data transcription and annotation, which takes outsized time and effort. In pursuit of a more scalable approach, scientists at Amazon — noting that people tend to reformulate misinterpreted commands — leveraged feedback from interactions to glean insights. In a paper detailing their work, they say that the automated self-learning system they deployed reduced errors across “millions” of Alexa customers.

It’s yet another step for Amazon along the way to a largely unsupervised and more human-like Alexa, as scientists and product managers from the company told VentureBeat in September. Such techniques have imbued Alexa with better contextual understanding of its surroundings with respect to smart home devices, as well as the ability to detect emotions like frustration in users’ voices. ... "