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,...