(Bloomberg) —
One day in 2011, a small team of artificial intelligence scientists based in Boston got an unexpected call: Amazon.com Inc. wanted to buy their company. Amazon’s founder and then chief executive officer, Jeff Bezos, was leading a secret team to develop a unique device, a voice-activated computer that could recognize and respond to a person’s questions from across a noisy room.
The world would soon know the device as the Amazon Echo, and its virtual personality as Alexa. Episode two of Foundering: The Amazon Story explores the creation of Alexa and its impact on culture and conventional notions of privacy. The episode also introduces listeners to the actress whose voice is now in millions of homes worldwide.
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