Among the many new announcements at Amazon’s recent fall event was an exciting update that provides a window into the future of machine learning technology. By now consumers are well aware of voice assistants, and Amazon’s Alexa leads the market. In fact, roughly one-in-four US adults owns a smart speaker, with 70-75% of that market share estimated to be captured by Amazon. This makes smart speakers in general, and Alexa in particular, one of the most recognizable and regular interactions that the average consumer has with machine learning technology. Machine learning is core to Alexa’s ability to understand natural language requests that are made by the user, and to predict how to most accurately respond to those requests.