Amazon Technologies, Inc.

Aparna Nandyal

Christopher Geiger Parker

Sumedha Arvind Kshirsagar

Venkatesh Kancharla

Arun Rajendran

Someshwaran Elangovan

Mugunthan Govindaraju

John Baker

Leopold Bushkin

Katherine Ann Baker

Ilana Rozanes

Piyush Bhargava

Michael Richard Baglole

Bradley Lyman

Suresh Boddu

Jintomon Joseph

Yamini Muralitharan

Vidya Narasimhan

Rajagopalan Ranganathan

Vishnu Jayavel

Ryan Andrew Lathan

This disclosure relates to answer prediction in a speech processing system. The system may disambiguate entities spoken or implied in a request to initiate an action with respect to a target user. To initiate the action, the system may determine one or more parameters; for example, the target (e.g., a contact/recipient), a source (e.g., a caller/requesting user), and a network (voice over internet protocol (VOIP), cellular, video chat, etc.). Due to the privacy implications of initiating actions involving data transfers between parties, the system may apply a high threshold for a confidence associated with each parameter. Rather than ask multiple follow-up questions, which may frustrate the requesting user, the system may attempt to disambiguate or determine a parameter, and skip a question regarding the parameter if it can predict an answer with high confidence. The system can improve the customer experience while maintaining security for actions involving, for example, communications.

Answer prediction in a speech processing system

A speech-processing system may provide access to multiple virtual assistants. Speech-processing systems may perform actions for or on behalf of users with the aid of skills; e.g., a shopping skill, navigation skill, communications skill, etc. Some skills may be associated with more than one assistant. The speech-processing system may determine which assistant to invoke upon receiving a command from a user device. The identity of the virtual assistant is propagated to the skill and the device, as well as other components of the speech-processing system. In some cases, however, a multi-assistant skill may determine that an assistant other than the one initially selected by the speech-processing system is to handle the command. The skill may send the identity of the new assistant back to the speech-processing system. The speech-processing system may restart the command dissemination process to provide each component of the system with the updated assistant identity.

Assistant determination in a skill

Methods and systems for performing contact resolution are described herein. When initiating a communications session using a voice activated electronic device, a contact name may be resolved to determine an appropriate contact with which the communications session may be directed to. Contacts from an individual's contact list may be queried to determine a listing of probable contacts associated with the contact name, and contact identifiers associated with the contact may be determined. Using one or more rules for disambiguating between similar contact names, a single contact may be identified, and a communications session with that contact may be initiated.

Contact resolution for communications systems

Systems, methods, and devices for establishing communications sessions with contacts are disclosed. In some embodiments, a first request may be received from a first device. The first request may be to communicate with a contact name. A user account associated with the first device may then be identified, and a contact list associated with the user account may be accessed to determine contacts associated with the contact name. Based on the contact list, a first contact and a second contact associated with the contact name may be identified. It may be determined, from memory, that the first contact is a first preferred contact. However, based on an intervening event, the second contact, rather than the preferred contact, may be selected for communicating with the contact.

Systems and methods for establishing a communications session

Systems and methods for establishing a communications system between multiple electronic devices are described herein. In some embodiments, first audio data representing a first utterance may be received from an initiating device. A first user account associated with the initiating device may be determined. After determining that the utterance comprises an intent to communicate with a target, a list of entity names associated with the user account may be generated. Each entity name may represent a user contact associated with the first user account, a user device corresponding to the first user account, and/or a set of entity names representing user contacts and devices. Based on a relative comparison of each entity name to the target's name, an entity name may be selected from the plurality of entity names. A communications session may then be established between the initiating device and a device represented by the selected entity name.

Systems and methods for device communications

Messaging account disambiguation

Growing community of inventors

Tamil Nadu, India

Aparna Nandyal