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

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: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 28 2019, @04:40PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 28 2019, @04:40PM (#821397)

    Dogs definitely have less intelligence than humans, and also a quite different way to sense their world (with smells that we cannot even perceive being a big part of their world). And yet, communication between humans and dogs works sufficiently well.

    And let me add, we are still far from creating an AI with dog-level intelligence. Maybe we should figure that out first, before aiming at human-level intelligence?

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