Amazon in Milan: Alexa, a familiar name, represents more than just a voice assistant. The brainchild of Amazon, it has evolved into a veritable ecosystem capable of profoundly influencing the way we interact with technology and our own daily lives. Alexa is the beating heart of various Amazon-branded devices, including Echo smart speakers and Echo Show intelligent displays. Thanks to its artificial intelligence, it allows users to manage a wide range of tasks with simple voice commands: playing music, setting alarms and reminders, controlling home automation, making calls and shopping, accessing information and media content, and much more.

Amazon in Milan

However, Alexa’s role within Amazon is not limited to home devices. In fact, the assistant is also integrated into various areas of corporate business, helping optimize logistical processes, enhance marketing strategies, and improve the customer experience. For the occasion, we met in Milan Lucrezia Mancini, Senior Business Development Manager, and Chiara Rubagotti, Language Engineer at the Alexa R&D Center in Turin. Both are working on Alexa and its improvement, including natural language understanding.

An engine of innovation in the service of development

Alexa’s impact extends beyond Amazon’s borders, representing a real catalyst for developing increasingly advanced technologies. Indeed, opening the Alexa platform to external developers has given rise to a thriving ecosystem of “skills,” or applications that expand its capabilities and make it customizable to each user’s needs. This openness has stimulated creativity and innovation in multiple sectors, leading to the emergence of new solutions for home automation, health, fitness, entertainment and education. “As with any other language, when we started developing Alexa in Italian, we started from scratch. We wanted Alexa to sound natural and be fluent in Italian. So what were the challenges?”

In fact, as with any other language, Italian is fascinating but equally complex. Think of the syntax morphology and accents; it is quite a different language from English. So let’s think, for example, about morphology. Italian is extremely rich. Adjectives, nouns, and verbs require agreement for gender and number. “So we can have temporary phrases being scattered in different positions across the sentences, and this again calls for an extra attention,” both say.