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General

If you're not finding the answer to your question on this website, this page will help you. If you're still unsure, don't hesitate to contact us or send your question to us directly.

What is Alexa?#

Alexa is a voice-controlled virtual assistant. Alexa is like the software that powers your smartphone, but instead of apps, she uses “skills.” Like your smartphone, Alexa includes many skills out-of-the-box, while others can be enabled by choice. Read more here

What is a (custom) skill?#

Smart Speakers like Amazon Echo come bundled up with built-in capabilities such as local search, answering questions, playing music and making weather predictions. Amazon allows extending the functionality of their smart devices by letting developers create voice applications for those platforms covering all kinds of use cases: playing games, reading the latest news, booking a ride or buying groceries. Amazon refers to those voice applications as Custom Alexa Skills. Read more [here] (../alexa/skill.md)

What is Melvin?#

Melvin is the first voice-based assistant for cancer genome analyses built on top of Amazon Alexa. It is a multi-modal skill that delivers audio and visual responses based on the user device. Read more here

How to enable the skill?#

You can add the Melvin skill to Alexa using the Alexa mobile app, the Amazon site on your computer, or even by voice command to the Alexa-enabled device. Read more here

How to navigate through Melvin?#

To start exploring, just say Tell me about followed by the name of a gene, cancer type, or data type. Melvin is able to remember your conversation, so you can ask to build compound queries one step at a time. For example, if you say, Tell me about TP53, followed by Show me breast cancer, Melvin will provide an analytical summary of TP53 in breast cancer. If you subsequently ask Show me mutations, Melvin will provided a detailed breakdown of TP53 mutations in breast cancer. You can swap any of these variables by providing another gene, cancer type, or data type.
Read more about other interactions here

What is Melvin voice recorder?#

In order for voice-based skills to be useful, they must be able to correctly hear users. This is particularly challenging for Melvin as it primarily supports out-of-vocabulary (OOV) terms (e.g. gene names). To overcome this challenge, we have initially applied machine learning methods to train Melvin using gene, cancer, and data types utterances from over a dozen individuals.

However, this model still may not correctly recognize utterances from users. For example, perhaps every time User A utters Tell me about MYC Melvin interprets this as Mac. Melvin's machine learning model may then map the utterance Mac to the gene MEK. This could be caused by a variety of things such as a user-specific pronunciation or accent. We have developed Melvin Voice Recorder to allow users to add their own gene, cancer, or data types utterances to our model. Melvin Voice Recorder provides a way for individuals like User A to effectively tell Melvin, "When you hear me say Mac that means I want MYC".

How to use the Melvin voice recorder?#

  1. Choose the gene, cancer or data type from the list of available phrases.
  2. Hit the microphone icon 🎙 and say the phrase chosen in step 1.
  3. Hit the UPLOAD button to save your utterance.
  4. Hit the CLEAR button and repeat steps [1-3] if you want to save additional utterances.

What kind of genomic data does Melvin use?#

Mutational and copy number data are from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) as provided by the Genomic Data Commons (GDC). TCGA gene expression data are from the Xenia web portal (TOIL dataset)

Which gene/data types/cancer types are available?#

  • Melvin currently supports genes that are part of the Cancer Gene Census (CGC).
  • The primary data types currently available for analysis in Melvin are mutational data, copy number alterations, and gene expression.
  • The 33 cancer types available in Melvin are from the list selected by TCGA.

What platforms/devices does Melvin work on?#

Melvin is a skill that is built on Amazon’s Alexa and is available to use on any Amazon device such as Echo, Echo Show, FireTVStick and also on Android/iOS devices in regions where the Alexa app is available on the marketplace.

Can individual results be saved?#

No, Melvin currently compiles an email report of the entire analysis session when prompted with Send that to me.

Can I use Melvin to analyse my own dataset?#

This is a feature that Melvin doesn’t support as of now, but will try to incorporate in the future.