Amazon.com Inc. plans to roll out a trio of new features for Alexa that should make interactions with the virtual assistant feel more natural, as well as significantly expand its utility.

The development effort is led by a group within the retail giant that’s known as the Alexa Brain Initiative. According to Ruhi Sarikaya, the executive who leads the team, the three capabilities are the first of several that Amazon intends to release this year. He announced the planned upgrade today at a conference in Lyon, France.

Context Carryover, the first upcoming feature, will use deep learning technology to enhance Alexa’s ability to “carry over” information from a user’s initial command to the other parts of the conversation. This will remove the need to call the virtual assistant by name before each follow-up command. More notably, it will also expand the range of requests that users can make.  

Amazon’s Sarikaya offered an example in a blog post published ahead of his conference presentation. Currently, he detailed, Alexa can only handle follow-ups to a question such as “how’s the weather in Seattle” if a user requests similar information such as the forecast for a specific day. Context Carryover will bring the ability to pose much more contextual questions such as “how to get to Seattle” as part of the same conversation.

Another big enhancement that Amazon plans to roll out will affect how users access Alexa Skills, extensions developed by outside developers. Sarikaya detailed that the virtual assistant will gain the ability to surface relevant Skills automatically in response to commands it can’t handle directly.

The feature, Skills Arbitration, could thus make Alexa much better-equipped to process niche requests. There are more than 40,000 extensions available for the assistant today that cover a massive array of user needs. But the average consumer only spends so much time manually looking for Skills, an adoption barrier the planned enhancement should lower.

Rounding out the trio of upcoming features is Memory. The capability will make it possible to use Alexa as a sort of voice-activated notepad and have it remember information that the user may want to bring up at a later date.

The announcement of the planned upgrade comes a week after Amazon’s most recent update to its virtual assistant, which brought a collection of customizable Skills called Alexa Blueprints. Users can choose from a selection of more than 20 templates that span categories such as entertainment and learning. 

Image: Amazon