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I have an important question, at the moment i am writing my last essay before starting with my bachelor thesis. It is about voice apps, which includes the alexa skills for sure.

But i need some informations about the word tolerance of the utterances. And I was not able to find some information on the internet yet. Does Alexa only recognize the utterances typed in by the developer or does Alexa uses machine learning like Google Assistant to learn about new utterances ? It is really important for my essay. So I would be very happy if you can help me with this question.

Thank you!

Juned Ahsan
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Antonia Röper
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3 Answers3

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Alexa also recognize slightly different sentences than what you defined as utterances. But if your intent is matched also depends on how many intents you have and how similar they are.

So what happens on Amazon side is behind the scenes and I don't think they use machine learning to get your utterances to intent connection right. Because you would need to train the algorithm somehow what is right and what was a wrong connection from phrase to intent.

In their documentation they suggest to use as many utterances as possible:

It is better to provide too many samples than to provide too few

https://developer.amazon.com/de/docs/custom-skills/best-practices-for-sample-utterances-and-custom-slot-type-values.html

timguy
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It will be too difficult to develop an alexa app if you need to configure all the possible variations of intent. Alexa learns from the phrases that you provide for an intent and uses machine learning to not just recognize the intents that you have configured but also the subtle variations too.

You can easily verify this by setting up a basic alexa app and testing it on online simulator.

Juned Ahsan
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  • Any source for this? I can confirm this with my skills. – stefan.s Mar 19 '20 at 11:41
  • You can try to say phrases not exactly what you have cofigured in your intent and Alexa should still match it depending on its confidence against an intent. – Juned Ahsan Mar 21 '20 at 23:32
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Based on what I saw using the echo device to test the skill and not only the online simulator (they are way too different, so be sure to test the skill with the real device because the behaviour is completely different between simulator and echo) I think that yes, Alexa use ML to understand what you have say to "enforce" the understanding into something that you have put into the slot.

This is a strange behaviour, because yes, you can say something different to fill the slot but there is no guarantee that Alexa will understand correctly what you have say and will trigger the correct slot.

You can try this behaviour simply putting some random or non-real word into the slots. If you say to Alexa something similar to that word, even if it doesn't exists, you will get a match, but if you say something that is completely different, there is no guarantee that the intent will be triggered.

(eg. if you put in the slot the word "blues", even if you say "blue" Alexa try to enforce her understanding into "blues". Or even better, try putting a completely random string like "asdajhfjkak" and say to Alexa something that is similar to that and you will get a match)

rivamarco
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  • Allowing a bit of fuzzyness in interpreting voice input is one thing. But this doesn't mean, that the Alexa Voice Service is learning new utterances by ML (as the OP asked). – stefan.s Mar 19 '20 at 11:44