Amazon to open A.I. research centre in Turin

(AGI) Turin, July 22 - Amazon is opening a new Development Centre in Turin to perfect the A.I. and automatic learning capabilities of voice service Alexa, it said on Friday. Alexa connects Amazon's cloud to the Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, Amazon Fire TV and Amazon Tap devices. The centre will open in late 2016 and focus on improving Alexa's voice recognition and natural language understanding (NLU). Amazon stated that the vast pool of talented individuals and the number of universities made Turin an ideal location for the complex. "We're pleased to launch a Machine Learning centre in Turin, a city that offers plenty of talent in the field of automatic learning technology and of direct interest for Alexa," said Alexa's Vice President and Chief Scientist, Rohit Prasad. "Our centre in Turin will play a vital role in developing Alexa's language understanding capabilities." Machine Learning is a branch of information technology that uses algorithms for predictive analytics, processing vast amounts of data without the need for systems to be specifically programmed for a task. Alexa relies on automatic learning for its voice activation, voice recognition based on cloud data, and its NLU. There will initially be openings for 10 positions for researchers in voice recognition and NLU, and applicants can visit the Amazon jobs website for more information. "We continue to make sizable investments in Italy and we're creating hundreds of jobs," said Amazon's Country Manager for Italy and Spain, Francois Nuyts. "Innovating for our clients' benefit is the basis of everything we do at Amazon in Italy. We're pleased that Turin was chosen as the headquarters for some of the most interesting technological activities we're working on in various locations around the world." (AGI). .