Amazon Alexa Will Soon Help You Make Restaurant Reservation And Book Uber

Soon, Alexa, a personal assistant from Amazon, can help users complete a night out experience, from booking a movie, making a restaurant reservation to pre-booking an Uber.

At its recent "re: Mars" event, the company demonstrated a brief demo. According to Amazon, this, as well as other multi-skill experiences, will first come to Alexa customers in the US first. Rohit Prasad, Alexa Vice President, and Head Scientist, said:

Exchanges between users and the smart assistant are mostly one-shot requests or interactions with several requests to perform more complex tasks.

If a customer wants to spend an evening going to a restaurant and watching a movie, they will need to interact independently with Alexa to find a movie theater, a nearby restaurant, and then buy movie tickets, reserve a table, and maybe book a ride. The customer will need to input all the information, from time, location, to the number of people.

To enable a new experience, a group of AI modules needs to work together to respond to the questions and requests of customers.

A separate AI module will determine the transition between different skills, “ which questions to pass to the restaurant search skill, for instance, and which to pass to the movie skill.”

Prasad also said:

A preview of "Alexa Conversations" was also announced by Prasad at the event showing a new deep-based learning approach which could be used by skill developer to create voice experiences that are more natural with less training data and fewer lines of code.

Through the preview, developers can create natural and flexible dialogues in a single skill. And the upcoming releases will be for developers to integrate a lot of skills into a conversation. Prasad said: