I am the single-threaded owner of the Alexa Health & Wellness Care Connections and Wellness initiatives. My team works with third parties to deliver products, services, and tools that allow Alexa customers to self-manage their wellness goals. Customers can improve their mental and emotional health through Alexa’s meditation and sleep skills, and likewise, they can also activate skills that provide insights to support their nutritional and fitness needs. My team also works on initiatives that allow customers to connect directly with clinical care from the safety, comfort, and convenience of their homes. We aim to support the customer wherever they are in their health & wellness journey, always encouraging customers to leverage the power of their Alexa assistant who knows them, understands their needs, and is always ready to help.

In my past life as a primary care physician, I used to have patient panels of ten thousand patients, most of whom had at least one chronic condition that required higher level of clinical care and vigilance. I know first-hand that the art of clinical medical medicine can't be as simple as administering a simple health Q&A. It’s a complex relationship between the patient and physician that involves visual cues, physical exam findings, time-boxed labs and radiology tests that often have a precise order of operations, and unquestioned trust. It never felt like I had enough time or resources to take care of my patients the way I wanted, especially when they left my office and went home. So, I’m incredibly excited that Alexa, which is the operating at the marriage of hardware, software, and AI, and is already found in millions of customers homes can get to know the patient, start to recognize those “cues," and inform the physician and care team that the patient is in need of intervention. With telehealth, Alexa is also able to connect the customer directly to clinical care, and given Amazon’s historical excellence at delivering solutions at scale, our solutions are widely available to everyone. These are not solutions only intended for the wealthy or tech savvy. So, though I no longer see patients in clinical medicine, I work on solutions that can help improve the lives of millions of people, young or old, rich or poor, urban or rural. That is incredibly rewarding and exciting for me as a physician.

I work on the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) team - a customer obsessed, innovative, highly technical and scrappy team that builds services powering and scaling the Alexa experiences you know and love! I head the ASK Runtime product team. Our mission is to make it easier for developers to innovate on behalf of our customers and build the next generation of Alexa skills and experiences.

Alexa has become integrated into the fabric of our lives with numerous first party & third party devices and experiences. I am excited by the sheer range of Alexa products - from wall-plugins to autos, and multi-modal devices in the kitchen to 75’’ TVs, all with rich skills that make them come to life. We have come a long way in embedding Alexa experiences into most devices, enabling serendipitous discovery, and making Alexa more conversational. I look forward to a future of Alexa experiences enabled by ambient intelligence that is available to customers when they need it, and fades into the background when not.

My team works on creating seamless context-aware interactions with Alexa customers. We leverage advanced AI to increase the trust of our customers in Alexa as the most reliable, and contextually intelligent personal assistant.

I am fascinated by all innovations happening behind the scenes to advance Alexa in serving our customers just as well as a human personal assistant would. I have been fortunate to be able to contribute to some of these features such as “whisper mode” and “multilingual mode”, where Alexa responds in kind to customer queries by whispering back, or dynamically switching between languages in response. Nowadays, I am energized by driving innovations to Alexa’s contextual awareness and reasoning abilities to seamlessly assist customers.

I lead the customer experience team for Alexa Everywhere, where it’s our mission to imagine and build delightful Alexa experiences customers expect by harnessing the capabilities of third-party partners. From product and design to onboarding, marketing, and ongoing engagement, we obsess about how customers interact with Alexa on third party products. We work on the products and devices that make lives fun and productive like TVs, PCs, smart watches, speakers, and so much more.

I am excited by any innovation that makes getting started with Alexa easier. Reducing obstacles to getting customers to what they really care about is exciting to me. The setup & discovery team in customer experience recently launched a service that allows us to discover if a customer has an unregistered third-party product with Alexa Built-in in their home, and then enable them to quickly complete activation in the Alexa mobile app. It’s an unexpected delight for customers to learn that Alexa is embedded in their TVs, for instance, and that they can begin to use Alexa easily.

I lead the Voice Interoperability Initiative (VII), and work with an incredible team to spearhead new simultaneous multi-agent technologies. We have launched a design guide, put code into Github via our MAX Toolkit, written white papers, hosted member sessions at Alexa Live, and more  to support the industry in accelerating knowledge and expertise in multi-agent implementations for our customers. We believe customers should have a choice on the agent they use for the task at hand on any device. We now have over 90 members supporting this initiative and many of them have showcased demos across multiple industries from entertainment to publishing and auto..

I am also the deal lead for the Disney partnership announced at the end of September. “Hey Disney” is a first as it represents the very first time we are implementing a multi-agent experience via Alexa Custom Assistant (ACA) on Echo friendly devices.

More recently, I began working with the team that is sending Alexa to space. I am a huge fan of innovations in space exploration, and cannot wait to work with our team to help define, and build out opportunities for Alexa in space!

I am interested in furthering the state-of-the-art in simultaneous agents on a device: it's an area I have been working on for a number of years. I am also excited at how Amazon is expanding low earth orbit satellite capabilities, and changing the game on connectivity with Project Kuiper. When it comes to space, the innovations being developed to make space habitable for humans are incredibly interesting. The Just Walk Out technology revolutionizing the retail experience is fascinating. Finally, I closely follow the evolution of cryptocurrency, and their potential for fundamentally making us re-think currency transactions.

I lead the science and research organization for Alexa Shopping with teams in Israel, UK and US. Our goal is to allow Alexa to understand the needs of all shoppers regardless of language, background abilities or economic means, and create delightful, time-saving for millions of customers worldwide in their shopping journeys, from discovery to inspiration. This encompasses taking on a set of open-research AI challenges that my teams address via  a “customer-obsessed science” approach, where we work backwards from customers needs to tackle problems that cannot be solved by existing methods. We  invent and experiment with new methods, approaches, models and algorithms to address these needs. We then implement and deploy associated solutions to customers in partnership with our engineering, design and product counterparts. Finally we validate the novelty of our methods by publishing at peer-reviewed venues, and thus help advance the state-of-the-art in AI for the benefit of all. 

It is hard to pick my favorite innovation among those that our scientists drove, so I will go for two recent ones that I find particularly inspiring for the research community. 

One is about giving Alexa a sense of humor. We have discovered that our customers like to be playful with Alexa, issuing requests that they don’t really expect her to satisfy (e.g. Alexa buy me a Lamborghini, or Alexa can you turn off the moon?). This relates to computational humor identified by Turing in his seminal paper on machine intelligence as one of the hardest challenges. It’s an awesome opportunity to investigate a Turing challenge, and, if we do it right, be able to truly delight customers. 

Another recent initiative is actually geared towards the academic research community, and students in particular. We offer them the opportunity to advance the state-of-the art in conversational AI via the Alexa Prize TaskBot challenge. Selected academic teams of students are funded to build a “ askBot", namely an agent that assists customers in completing tasks requiring multiple steps and decisions. The qualifying bots are deployed to Alexa users who can invoke one of them by saying “Alexa, assist me” or “Alexa, let’s work” and request help on their cooking or home improvement tasks. You should all give it a shot: it’s fun and will help students advance their research!