Rohit Prasad grew up in the Star Trek era, fascinated by the idea of interacting with computers via voice. So he was excited to join the Amazon Alexa team a decade ago, working initially on far-field speech recognition. He went on to become Alexa’s chief scientist, and his role expanded in the past year to lead the Alexa business.
The broader purview puts him in charge of what he calls Amazon’s “North Star” for Alexa, seeking to create an indispensable personal assistant, just as emerging forms of generative AI transform the industry.
“This is a super exciting time in AI. I’m glad that AI is back,” he says, in part. “The fact that our customers are interacting more than ever with Alexa is a testimony to the fact that our North Star is working. And what’s happening with large language models and other companies is a very good thing for the AI industry as a whole.”
What’s next for Alexa? How does Amazon’s voice assistant stack up against ChatGPT? Is that a fair comparison? How will privacy play into all of this? And what’s Amazon’s commitment to Alexa in this era of corporate cutbacks?
Those are some of our topics on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast.
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