Amazon has announced plans to improve upon Alexa Skills Kit with the addition of hundreds of new built-in commands over the next few weeks. David Isbitski, a developer at Amazon in a blog announced that the company is rolling out a library of a whole range of new slots and intents for the Alexa digital assistant.
Alexa originally had only 15 command categories called ‘intents’ that are used with voice commands like cancel, stop, yes, no and help. Alexa also has ‘slots’ for information like cities, time, numbers and dates.
“These new slots and intents are the product of learnings over the last year for Alexa’s natural language understanding (NLU) that help Alexa better understand and reply to requests. With the new built-in library, we have combined those learnings with the most common requests we have seen from the developer community to offer hundreds of built-ins for use in your own skills,” Isbitski said.
The custom skills that Amazon wants to bring can do for example, allow someone to ask the temperature of a location for the coming four days. “If we wanted to build this skill previously, we would have to create an interaction model that included a combination of built-in and custom intents for handling how someone would ask the question,” added Isbitski.
At its Amazon Web Services conference re:Invent, the US e-retailer announced two new initiatives with Intel. The first is the announcement of a smart speaker made by Intel that will be featuring Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. The speaker will be based on the Form Factor Reference Designs (FFRD).
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Secondly, Amazon’s collaboration with Intel will allow partners to build new devices using the Intel based smart speaker featuring Alexa, which is due in the first quarter of 2017. The announcement was made by Alexa Voice Service (AVS) content marketing manager, Ted Karczewski in a blog post.
[Source:- THE INDIAN EXPRESS]
