Rohit Prasad is the vice president and head scientist of Amazon Alexa and one of its original creators.

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Here's the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

00:00 - Introduction 04:34 - Her 06:31 - Human-like aspects of smart assistants 08:39 - Test of intelligence 13:04 - Alexa prize 21:35 - What does it take to win the Alexa prize? 27:24 - Embodiment and the essence of Alexa 34:35 - Personality 36:23 - Personalization 38:49 - Alexa's backstory from her perspective 40:35 - Trust in Human-AI relations 44:00 - Privacy 47:45 - Is Alexa listening? 53:51 - How Alexa started 54:51 - Solving far-field speech recognition and intent understanding 1:11:51 - Alexa main categories of skills 1:13:19 - Conversation intent modeling 1:17:47 - Alexa memory and long-term learning 1:22:50 - Making Alexa sound more natural 1:27:16 - Open problems for Alexa and conversational AI 1:29:26 - Emotion recognition from audio and video 1:30:53 - Deep learning and reasoning 1:36:26 - Future of Alexa 1:41:47 - The big picture of conversational AI