| One day in early 2011, while meeting with his technical adviser, Jeff Bezos walked up to a conference room whiteboard and sketched out his idea for a new device—a relatively inexpensive virtual assistant, independent from your cell phone, that users could speak to from across a noisy room. The drawing looked something like a box; it had a speaker, a microphone, and a mute button. Beside it, Bezos' adviser scribbled a note about the first apparent challenge: how to connect a keyboardless device to Wi-Fi. But it would hardly be the last. Users wouldn't meet Alexa for another four years. As it turns out, training a computer to listen to the right noises, correctly interpret requests, and then respond to them intelligently is no easy task. This week, in an excerpt from his new book, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, Brad Stone takes readers inside Amazon as it raced to bring its artificially intelligent assistant to life under the watchful eye of an impatient boss. Along the way, the covert team would become embroiled in battles over dueling artificial intelligence methodologies, data collection tactics, and even what a virtual assistant's voice should sound like. You might feel like you know the Alexa sitting on your kitchen counter, but much like the company that birthed her, the assistant holds many secrets. This week, Stone reveals what Alexa could never tell you, no matter how many times you ask. Ricki Harris | Associate Editor, WIRED |
