Introduction

A voice assistant can be described as software that receives and interprets a verbal input from the user, performs a requested task if needed, and then responds back to the user, again, in a verbal format. Voice assistants rely on artificial intelligence and self-improving machine learning algorithms to improve speech understanding precision. Amazon Alexa is one of the most popular voice assistants. It is distributed as standalone devices smart speaker or as an application for smartphones or computers Android and iOS.

Voice applications for Amazon Alexa are called skills. By default, Alexa-enabled devices do not have any custom skills installed, so if the user wants to use a custom skill, he has to find the skill on Amazon Skills Store and activate it. One such custom skill is Melvin, a conversational interface to cancer genomics data. Before diving deep into the Melvin, understanding how Alexa responds to a user request is important.