Amazon Alexa Moves One Step Closer To Human-Like Interaction With New Feature

Artificial Intelligence is great. The way it has grown over the years and especially the implementation of it with our smartphones and smart home devices is really impressive. While people joke about how AI is still very robotic and not close to being human-like, Amazon has taken the first step in fixing that. It has announced the launch of a follow-up mode for its voice assistant, Alexa.

Alexa, now present in everything from smartphones to smart speakers, is a great tool for people with smart home devices. However, asking questions to Alexa, or pretty much any AI assistant can be very monotonous and robotic. For every time, you need to say the keyword like “Hey Alexa” or “OK Google” to make them listen to you.

With the new mode, users can ask follow-up questions to Alexa without saying the keyword every time. Alexa will now listen for five seconds after the first response. If the Alexa-powered device is ready for a follow-up question, the blue indicator light will flash. This will be an indication for the user to ask their question. For people paranoid about their devices listening to them all the time can switch off this feature. Also, if no follow-up question is asked within the time frame, the device will restore to the sleep mode.

Amazon has also clarified that it won’t listen to you all the time. It claims that Alexa will not respond if it isn’t “confident you’re speaking to her”.

For example, if she detects that speech was background noise or that the intent of the speech was not clear.

This new feature is in the right direction for AI enthusiasts. However, people like Elon Musk have been vocal about their apprehensions related to Artificial Intelligence. The new feature won’t go down well with people who don’t like AI as of now.