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Rastrow discusses the continued challenges and expanded role of speech recognition, and some of the interesting research and themes that came out of ICASSP 2021.
Conversational AI

Alexa & Friends features Ariya Rastrow, senior principal scientist, Alexa AI

Rastrow discussed the continued challenges and expanded role of speech recognition, and some of the interesting research and themes that emerged from ICASSP 2021.

By Staff writer
June 03, 2021
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On June 24, senior principal scientist Ariya Rastrow joined principal Alexa evangelist Jeff Blankenburg on Alexa & Friends to discuss his expertise in speech recognition technologies and career with Alexa, from the early days of bringing the conversational AI technology to customers.

The two discussed Rastrow’s career, some of the most pressing challenges in the field of automatic speech recognition and machine learning, and the interesting research and themes coming out of the ICASSP 2021 conference earlier in June.

Ariya Rastrow joined Amazon in 2012 as a member of the initial team that built Echo and Alexa and has served as a technical lead building ASR and NLP technologies from ground up, and building low-latency ASR runtime decoder (both on edge and for cloud) and scalable language modeling technologies for Alexa.

Rastrow earned his PhD at the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) at the Johns Hopkins University and has more than 15 years of hands-on experience working on automatic speech recognition and machine learning.

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