[tubemonkey]

"Alexa, happy birthday"

As we celebrate Alexa's fifth birthday, we're looking toward the future.

November 6 is an important day for Amazon: Alexa’s 5th birthday. Like any birthday, this milestone gives us an opportunity to celebrate the many ways Alexa has impacted customers’ lives, and look ahead to what’s next.

The introduction of Alexa five years ago was a pivotal moment for artificial intelligence—it brought voice-first technology out of the lab, and now tens of millions of customers use Alexa each month.

When we started working on Alexa, the technology didn't even exist. While voice computing was not new, our vision for it—affordable, always-ready, far-field technology that’s functional even in noisy environments—was different. Amazonians have spent years inventing to solve hard science and engineering problems so that we can execute against that original vision. Today, their work in leading-edge technology like deep neural networks, transfer learning, active learning, and unsupervised learning (more on that here)—combined with investments in cloud computing, customer experience, and a world-class hardware team—means we can deliver truly ambient computing experiences that make customers’ lives easier, more convenient, and more fun.

Five years ago, Alexa only knew how to do 13 things; today she can do so much more, from planning a night out to identifying grocery items for visually impaired customers, and has more than 100,000 skills from developers. At launch, she only spoke one language; today Alexa can tell jokes or share the latest news in 8 languages and 7 language variants. We launched with Alexa available on one device; today there are hundreds of products with Alexa built-in, from cars and smartphones to PCs, headphones, and wearables—and customers can choose from more than 85,000 Alexa-compatible products. There are now hundreds of thousands of developers building for and with Alexa, and the Alexa flywheel is helping to generate billions of dollars for the developer and device-maker community.

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