The Alexa Fellowship inspires and enables the next generation of curious minds to invent the next big thing in conversational AI. The Graduate Fellowship supports PhD and post-doctoral students specializing in conversational AI at select universities. The Innovation Fellowship empowers technology entrepreneurship faculty members to help student entrepreneurs innovate with voice interfaces.
The Alexa Graduate Fellowship fosters conversational AI research and education.
It’s day 1 for voice and we’re just scratching the surface of how voice interfaces will change how we interact with technology. Realizing this potential requires solving many complex natural language and speech science problems. When we started working on Alexa, much of this technology didn't exist. Collaborating with universities continues to be essential to advance the state-of-the-art of conversational AI.
The Alexa Innovation Fellowship inspires and enables student entrepreneurs to enhance their products with voice.
As conversational AI advances, we will increasingly interact with technology using voice. Since technology innovation and entrepreneurship starts on college campuses, we’re partnering with leading university entrepreneurship centers to help student-led startups across all industries supercharge their innovations with voice.
Research
The Alexa Fellowship supports advanced conversational AI research by providing funding and mentorship to PhD and post-doctoral students. These students, under their faculty advisor’s leadership and with additional guidance from their Alexa AI mentor, are pushing the boundaries of the capabilities of spoken language systems.
Faculty
Ten leading entrepreneurship center faculty members passionate about new technology were selected as the inaugural class of Alexa Innovation Fellows. Innovation Fellows are invited to Seattle to learn from the Alexa team and network with successful Alexa Fund entrepreneurs.
Education
Faculty Advisors and Alexa Graduate Fellows teach conversational AI to undergraduate and graduate students using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) and Alexa Voice Services (AVS). Students are introduced to the science behind voice technology via hands on labs and group projects.
Students
Innovation Fellows serve as expert resources for students on their campus. While every Innovation Fellow uses their training and resources for the benefit of student entrepreneurs, each fellow does so in their own way. To learn more about what resources are available on each campus, explore the 2018-2019 Innovation Fellow class details here.
Conversational AI systems are computers that people can interact with simply by having a conversation. Conversational AI signals a huge advancement in the way we interact with technology. Unlike menus, touchscreens, or mouse clicks, using our voice to have a conversation is one of the most natural ways to use a computer; it requires no learning curve. This new method of human-computer interaction makes powerful computer applications even easier to use and accessible to more people.
Examples of fields that can advance the state-of-the-art of conversational AI include: wake-word detection, audio signal processing, automatic speech recognition, speaker diarization, voice recognition, natural language understanding, entity resolution, contextual reasoning, dialogue management, question answering, and text-to-speech natural language generation.
