The University of Waterloo has become one of four North American universities selected to participate in a new artificial intelligence research program funded by Amazon. As part of the program, engineering students at UWaterloo will use knowledge from classes on artificial intelligence to develop new uses for a voice-activated virtual assistant system known as Alexa. The system uses natural language understanding and speech recognition technology to process voice queries and commands from users. “It’s evolving at incredible speed,” said Fakhri Karray, director of the Centre for Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UWaterloo. “These are very exciting times for researchers, product developers and customers.”
UWaterloo