Categories: Artificial IntelligencePersonal Assistants

Amazon’s echo

Amazon’s Echo looks promising. I’ve been a huge proponent of a ubiqutous, always-listening, ambient presence personal assistant experiences. There are many articles on the web speculating on the reasons Amazon is doing this.* Whether it’s about making it easier to order things from Amazon, to collect speech data, to take over home automation, etc. it doesn’t change the fact that this effort is all about helping users achieve things using speech as the primary mode of interaction. The operating system and applications become second citizens in this world. Information and services are consumed through speech with the personal assistant being the enabler. I love it! I wish Amazon all the best.

* Some of the articles out there

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about