Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #57

ℹ️ EPISODE INFO

Released

December 14, 2019

Duration

1h 45m

Channel

Lex Fridman Podcast

Watch on YouTube

▶ Open ↗

🎤 SPEAKERS

• Lex Fridman

  host

• Rohit Prasad

  guest

🧾 EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of Lex Fridman Podcast, featuring Lex Fridman and Rohit Prasad, Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #57 explores inside Alexa: Building Trustworthy Conversational AI for Real Life Lex Fridman and Rohit Prasad, head scientist and VP of Amazon Alexa, discuss how Alexa was conceived, engineered, and deployed as a large‑scale conversational AI. They explore philosophical questions about human–machine interaction, intelligence, and the future of voice assistants, alongside very practical issues like far‑field speech recognition, multi‑turn dialogue, and user trust. Rohit explains the Alexa Prize competition, self‑learning systems, and the shift from transactional voice commands toward goal‑oriented, reasoning‑driven dialogue. Throughout, privacy, transparency, and the challenge of meeting extremely high user expectations for reliability and safety remain central themes.

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