Abstract: Alexa is a virtual assistant AI technology launched by Amazon in 2014. One of key enabling technologies is wakeword, which allows users to interact with Alexa devices hands-free via voice. We present some of the unique ML challengesposed in wakeword, and how Federated Learning can be used to address them. We also present some considerations when bringing Federated Learning to consumer grade, embedded applications.

Biography: Shiv Vitaladevuni is a Senior Manager in Machine Learning at Amazon Alexa, focusing on R&D for Alexa family of devices such as Echo, Dot, FireTV, etc. At Amazon, Shiv leads a team of scientists and engineers inventing embedded speechand ML products used by millions of Alexa customers across all Alexa devices, around the globe. His team conducts research in areas such as Federated ML, Large scale semi/unsupervised learning, User diversity and fairness in ML, Speaker adaptation and personalization,memory efficient deep learning models, etc. Prior to Amazon, Shiv worked on video and text document analysis at Raytheon BBN Technologies, and bio-medical image analysis at Howard Hughes Medical Institute.