Amazon Technologies, Inc.

Aakarsh Nair

Gary Zhong

Collin Charles Davis

Jonathan Alan Leblang

Milo Oostergo

Yu-Hsiang Cheng

Ameet Nirmal Vaswani

Peter F Hill

Brett Richard Taylor

Kevin Crews

Patrick Joseph Armstrong

Sunitha Kalkunte Srivatsa

Richard Christopher Green

Cassity Barrows Queen

Maayan Aharon

Nithya Venkataraman

Lohit Bijani

Samuel John Young

Andrew Hayden

Ivan King Yu Sham

Rohit Krishna Kumar

Steven Michael Reddie

Sushant Bhatia

Scott Zachary Bressler

Ian William Stewart

Inchara Shivalingaiah

Peter Sven Vosshall

Sajeeva Lakmal Bandara Pallemulle

Ranganath Atreya

Dhruva Lakshmana Rao Batni

Nikhil Dinkar Joshi

Bryan Nicholas Moffatt

Kamlesh Nanda

Bryan Kenneth Summersett

Ivan King Sham

Peter Frank Hill

This disclosure describes a feedback service that collects feedback for skills, or capabilities, of a virtual assistant that interacts with users, and associates the feedback with the appropriate skills. Virtual assistants interact with users via voice-enabled devices that are backed by voice-processing systems that support various skills of the virtual assistants. Due to large numbers of skills, users are unable to determine which skill is invoked during interactions with virtual assistants, and are thus unable to provide feedback for the skill. The techniques described herein include continuing a speech dialogue with a user after completion of an interaction, and requesting feedback regarding the interaction. Additionally, the techniques may include collecting contextual data for the interaction (e.g., dropped packets, latency caused by jitter, etc.). The feedback service can associate the feedback and contextual data with the particular skill used in the interaction to improve the functioning of the virtual assistant.

Centralized feedback service for performance of virtual assistant

Technologies are disclosed for interacting with a virtual assistant to request updates associated with one or more events and/or perform actions. According to some examples, a user may use their voice to interact with a virtual assistant to receive updates relating to events occurring during a certain period of time. For example, a user may request an update associated with one or more events occurring that day. The system may access data sources (e.g., calendar services, email services, etc.) to obtain data associated with the events, tag the events according to one or more conditions indicated by the data, and/or rank the events according to the tags. In addition, to resolve conditions associated with the events, the virtual assistant may also include options in the update to perform certain actions and/or to provide response data. The virtual assistant may generate the update and audibly provide the update to the user.

Interacting with a virtual assistant to receive updates

Technologies are disclosed for interacting with a virtual assistant to coordinate, recommend and perform actions. According to some examples, a user may use their voice to interact with a virtual assistant to receive recommendations relating to determining when to perform one or more actions. For example, a user may interact with a virtual assistant to request a recommendation as to when they should leave for the office, leave the office for the day, perform a task, and the like. The recommendation system accesses selected data sources (e.g., calendars, task lists, traffic, transportation schedules, maps, . . . ) to obtain data used in generating the recommendation. In addition, to providing a recommended time, the virtual assistant may also recommend actions to perform. The virtual assistant may also provide notifications to one or more other users that includes information relating to the user leaving.

Interacting with a virtual assistant to coordinate and perform actions

Technologies are disclosed for disambiguating contact information using relationship data using a virtual assistant. A user interacts with a virtual assistant to obtain and utilize contact information. For example, a virtual assistant may allow users to perform an action that utilizes contact information (e.g., make a call to a contact). The virtual assistant utilizes a contact service to identify candidate contacts that are related to the requesting user. The contact service identifies candidate contacts based on relationship data between the requesting user and the stored contacts. For example, the relationship data may indicate that the requesting user is on the same project or team as another contact, that the requesting user has the same role as another contact, that the requesting user is a manager of another contact, as well as other attributes. In some examples, the contact service limits the number of candidate contacts provided to requesting user.

Disambiguating contacts using relationship data

Systems and methods are disclosed related to determining and providing contextual information associated with a meeting based in part by parsing text from a meeting invitation or calendar entry. A voice-capturing device may receive audio data before or during a meeting that includes an invocation phrase used to invoke a voice-based functionality. A response may be generated by the voice-capturing device or an associated service provider system based on the contextual information determined from the parsed meeting invitation and/or related sources.

Contextual parsing of meeting information

Technologies are disclosed for relaying availability information using a virtual assistant. The virtual assistant can serve as a personal assistant to a user and receive and provide availability information associated with a user. The availability information may include information such as, but not limited to location information about the user, timing information, (e.g., a time the user left), message information (e.g., a message left by the user, a message left by a person looking for the user, . . . ), and the like. The availability information that is provided by the virtual assistant may be different depending on the identity of the requesting user. The virtual assistant may also record messages from requesting users that may be provided to the user upon return and/or while the user is away (e.g., via email, text message, instant message, phone call, and the like).

Relaying availability using a virtual assistant

Techniques for selecting a meeting to join in response to a voice command from a user are described herein. A user may utter a voice command to 'join my meeting' and, in response, the techniques may access a calendar associated with the user to identify the call-in information used to join the meeting. If the calendar indicates that the user is listed as an invitee for multiple meetings at the current time, then the techniques may analyze an array of criteria to determine which meeting the user most likely would like to join.

Selecting meetings based on input requests

Systems and methods are disclosed related to determining device settings for a meeting based in part by parsing text from a meeting invitation or calendar entry, and controlling one or more remotely controllable devices during the meeting according to the determined settings. Based on contextual information determined from a parsed meeting invitation and/or related sources, controllable devices such as remote-controllable window shades, lighting equipment, camera equipment, display screens and/or other in-room equipment may be automatically assigned to determined settings before or during an in-person meeting, conference call or videoconference.

Device control based on parsed meeting information

A system and method for profile-based cache management is disclosed. A cache management service can obtain a plurality of requests for network resource and corresponding responses, group the requests based, at least in part, on various criterion or technique, determine and cache content parts of the responses corresponding to each group of requests. Cache profiles corresponding to each group of requests and identifying corresponding cached content parts can be built, maintained or updated by the cache management service. A subsequent request for network resource can be matched to one or more cache profiles for retrieval of applicable cached content and for generation of a partial response to the request therefrom. Non-cached content or updates to cached content can be further retrieved for generation of updating data to the partial response, and thus completing a full response to the request for network resource.

Profile-based cache management

Systems and methods are disclosed related to determining a likelihood that a user is present in physical proximity to one or more computing devices based on factors such as detecting the user's voice, receiving beaconing signals from a user's mobile device, location information sent from other devices, input received via a camera, and/or other input at various devices that are geographically dispersed. Based on user presence information, a system may determine whether to broadcast a notification for the user to a given device for audible or visual presentation by the device.

Selective notification delivery based on user presence detections

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Lynnwood, CA, United States of America

Aakarsh Nair