Voice In Canada Flash Briefing #67

Hello there. So today I want to give you a little bit of an update from an Amazon perspective. As you may know, Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, came out with his letter to shareholders and this was publicly released on the Internet and I thought it was pretty neat.

I thought I would just kind of summarize a couple of the key points that he highlighted in his letter to shareholders given the fact that we are Amazon Alexa fans and to hear a little bit about his perspective about what he sees happened over the past year and what he sees for the future for Amazon.

So first of all, he highlighted the fact that numerous surveys are showing that Amazon is a company ranked number one in customer satisfaction and that has always been a big priority for Jeff Bezos.

I don’t know about you, but that fits with me. I love using Amazon as far as ordering things. It’s so easy.

It’s so consumer focused and that totally makes sense to me and as long as I think they continue to do that, I think Amazon’s going to do well.

To illustrate the success and the growth of Amazon Jeff writes that there are now over 560,000 employees at Amazon has, he calls them Amazonians imagine that 560,000 people and there are thousands and thousands and thousands of these employees working on Alexa, which I think is absolutely incredible.

Amazon is a company ranked number one in customer satisfaction.

Amazon Letter to Shareholders

As far as Alexa goes in particular, I’m just going to read you a quick excerpt from his letter because I think this is really nice and it really captures the essence of what Amazon is doing with Alexa over the recent past and where they’re going.

So Jeff writes, “Customer embrace of Alexa continues with Alexa enabled devices among the bestselling items across all of Amazon. We’re seeing extremely strong adoption by other companies and developers that want to create their own experiences with Alexa. There are now more than 30,000 skills {keep in mind that’s the states} for Alexa from outside developers and customers control more than 4,000 smart home devices from 1200 unique brands. The foundations of Alexa continue to get smarter every day. We’ve developed and implemented an on device fingerprinting technique, which keeps the device from waking up when it hears Alexa on a commercial on TV such as during the Superbowl. The far field speech recognition has improved by 15% over the last year and in the US, UK and Germany {Too bad he didn’t mention candidate here} we’ve improved Alexa spoken language understanding by more than 25% over the last 12 months through enhancements and Alexa’s machine learning components and the use of semi-supervised learning techniques. Finally, we’ve dramatically reduced the amount of time required to teach Alexa new languages by using machine translation and transfer learning techniques, which allows us to serve customers in more countries”.

So that’s exciting because I have to think that this is going to have some implications for the French Canadian population. So this goes on and on and on.

If you just search letter to shareholders, 2017 Amazon, you can see all the details about this, but I just thought this was a nice piece of news to share with you and a very, very interesting from my perspective.

All right, we’ll talk again tomorrow.

Resources Mentioned in this Episode

Other Useful Resources

Listen on your Echo Device! Easy as 1-2-3!

Voice in Canada Skill Logo1. Open your Alexa app and click on the Menu button > Settings > Flash Briefing.
2. Click on “Add Content” and search for “Voice in Canada”.
3. Click on “Voice in Canada” and the Enable button.

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Alexa, what’s in the news?

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