The following is a conversation with Roja Prasad.

He's the vice president and head scientist

of Amazon Alexa and one of its original creators.

The Alexa team embodies some of the most challenging,

incredible, impactful, and inspiring work

that is done in AI today.

The team has to both solve problems

at the cutting edge of natural language processing

and provide a trustworthy, secure, and enjoyable experience

to millions of people.

This is where state-of-the-art methods

in computer science meet the challenges

of real world engineering.

In many ways, Alexa and the other voice assistants

are the voices of artificial intelligence

to millions of people and an introduction to AI

for people who have only encountered it in science fiction.

This is an important and exciting opportunity.

So the work that Roja and the Alexa team are doing

is an inspiration to me and to many researchers

and engineers in the AI community.

This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.

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