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Amazon's Alexa Needs a Body to Understand the World

posted by martyb on Thursday March 28 2019, @06:35AM   Printer-friendly

takyon writes:

Alexa's chief scientist thinks the assistant needs a robot body to understand the world

Amazon's Rohit Prasad, head scientist and an instrumental member of the Alexa division, says the company's personal software assistant would be far smarter if it had a robot body and cameras to move around in the real world. Prasad, speaking at MIT Technology Review's EmTech Digital AI conference in San Francisco yesterday, said, "The only way to make smart assistants really smart is to give it eyes and let it explore the world."

Some Alexa-enabled smart devices already have cameras. But a robot body would be new. Prasad's comments suggest that work could be in service of one day giving Alexa a body — although he wouldn't confirm this directly. Prasad works on natural language processing and other machine learning capabilities for Alexa, so it's likely if he wanted to test these features out, he'd be one of the few Amazon employees who could easily go ahead and try it.

Someday, we can truly have sex with Alexa.

Related: Amazon Plans to Add Alexa Voice Support to Microwaves, Amplifiers, Subwoofers, and "In-Car Gadgets"

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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday March 28 2019, @02:16PM (2 children)

    by looorg (578) on Thursday March 28 2019, @02:16PM (#821325)

    Just insert the Alexa into a RealDoll and be done with it? I'm sure they could find some cavity in the torso or someplace where they could fit it in. Done.

    TOTALLY NOT SAFE FOR WORK LINK (depending on where you work ...)
    https://www.realdoll.com/ [realdoll.com]

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday March 28 2019, @04:08PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 28 2019, @04:08PM (#821375) Journal

    Well, it's SFW if you block javascript.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Thursday March 28 2019, @07:38PM

      by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Thursday March 28 2019, @07:38PM (#821471) Homepage
      Narp. w3m (with images enabled) renders it NSFW. You were honouring fancy-schmancy stylesheets that hid the NSFW bits that are on the front page, but which w3m has no comprehension of.
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves