Developing a Proxy Service to Bring Naturality to Amazon’s Personal Assistant “Alexa”

Abstract

Amazon’s Alexa is an intelligent personal assistant, developed to be used jointly with a Bluetooth Speaker and microphone hardware called Amazon Echo. Even though Alexa is supposed to be a natural user interface, its use is not very natural. As a user is intending to use Amazon’s Alexa system, they must follow a very tighten and structured way to provide the commands for the system to achieve its goal. In this paper, we propose a proxy service called “Plis”. This service was developed as a Skill to be used with the Amazon Echo. Therefore, a user can say: Alexa, “plis” and our functionality will start its job. Our skill determines from the natural way in which the user speaks what they are asking for. With that information, we create a query that would be further sent to other skills already providing the functionality required.