Alexa In Canada: Amazon Alexa And Echo Skills, Tips, And Tricks For Canadians

In this episode, Teri welcomes Jeff Adams, CEO of Cobalt Speech & Language, and often labelled “The Alexa Inventor”, to discuss how Amazon created the Alexa Voice Service.Welcome Jeff Adams!Jeff Adams has been involved with speech technology in one way or another for over 24 years. He got his start by working for a small speech-technology company in Boston, and through a series of acquisitions, ended up working at Nuance, the company behind the successful speech-recognition app Dragon. He left Nuance in 2009 to join a voice-message transcription start-up. That was a turning point. The start-up got Amazon’s attention when they found out the start-up’s technology could match the accuracy of human transcribers. Amazon acquired them and and put them to work on what would become Alexa.How do you feel about Jeff Adams being labeled Alexa’s creator?Amazon already had a vision for what they wanted.Jeff says he did not invent Alexa. When Amazon got him and his team to Seattle, they explained, behind closed doors a