Amazon’s buzziest product is a hit—and it’s all thanks to Toni Reid and her female driven team.
It’s hard not to like Alexa. She’s quirky—her celebrity crush is Benedict Cumberbatch, and she sings autotuned songs with impressive accuracy. According to the Myers-Briggs personality scale, a test popular in business schools, she’s an ESFJ (which stands for extraversion, sensing, feeling, and judgment): sociable lover of people, great with details, helpful, and gets stuff done. Alexa’s also a bit of a troublemaker; last year, she ordered a Sparkle Mansion for a kindergartner and charged the $170 dollhouse to the child’s parents’ credit card. Oh, and she’s a robot.
Alexa is Amazon’s voice-controlled virtual assistant. She responds to commands, predicts the weather, plays a wide variety of music, can order anything from your dinner to paper towels to a Lyft, and even tells knock-knock jokes. All without a screen.
Amazon’s hot new technology wouldn’t be nearly so popular if it weren’t for Toni Reid. Reid joined the Alexa team as director in 2014, when it was still a top-secret project in Amazon’s hardware division, Lab 126. Around the same time, Reid was remodeling her kitchen, and her home was littered with Echos. (Alexa, the voice technology, was first housed in a tall cylindrical speaker called the Echo; currently, Alexa also lives inside the Tap, a portable speaker, and the Dot, a short cylindrical speaker.) When a painter visited Reid’s place, she quickly hid one Echo in a kitchen drawer—but the gadget hadn’t gone through speech-recognition boot camp yet, so the tiniest noise could have “woken up” Alexa. And the painter’s voice did just that.
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Bu hikaye Marie Claire - US dergisinin July 2017 sayısından alınmıştır.
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