There's Incredible Interest in Using Voice to Interact with Computers

Werner Vogels, 58, Amazon’s chief technology officer, on how AI and machine learning will change the way businesses use data.

- HaricHandan Arakali

What are some of the important technology trends playing out today?

Businesses are now centred around data. With the rise of the cloud, every business has access to the same computing power and storage tools. What differentiates them is the way they’re going to use data. What kind of algorithms are they using, what kind of data are they collecting, what kind of data sources are they putting into place and how do you do analytics on that?

The second part of this is doing things in real time. You no longer want to know inventory levels from yesterday, but from right now.

The third phase involves machine learning—taking data from the past and making predictions. The newer set of analytics—mostly Artificial Intelligence (AI) like image recognition, speech and language processing—is being driven by cloud computing. That is one big trend and it will accelerate.

Tell us about how voice is becoming important.

The many voice-driven interactive systems today reflect the shift in the way computing is happening. There is an incredible interest in making natural language and voice the default way of interaction with computers. In retail, Amazon’s Echo speakers and Alexa Voice Service are examples. For enterprises, in AWS [Amazon Web Services], Amazon’s Polly and Lex software allows you to do automatic speech recognition—take speech inputs, execute programmes based on that and speak back with the results.