Amazon today announced that it will open a new Development Center in Turin focused on developing Machine Learning capabilities for Alexa, Amazon’s cloud-based voice service behind Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, Amazon Fire TV, and Amazon Tap.

Opening before the end of 2016, this will be Amazon’s 15th development centre in Europe the new center will be dedicated to advancements in speech recognition and natural language understanding. Turin was chosen because of the pool of talent available from which to draw and the proximity to the renowned Universities in Turin.

Our Turin center will play a critical role in advancing Alexa’s spoken language understanding capabilities.
Rohit Prasad - vice president and chief scientist, Alexa.

“We are excited to launch a Machine Learning center in Turin because it has a wealth of talent in Machine Learning technologies directly relevant to Alexa,” said Rohit Prasad, Vice President and Chief Scientist, Alexa. “Our Turin center will play a critical role in advancing Alexa’s spoken language understanding capabilities.”

Machine Learning is a sub-discipline of computer science. Machine Learning based algorithms allow systems to make predictions from large collections of data without being explicitly programmed. Alexa uses Machine Learning in areas including wake word detection, cloud-based speech recognition, and natural language understanding.”

Amazon has Machine Learning scientists all around the world – including in Seattle, Boston and Palo Alto (North-America), Aachen, Berlin, Edinburgh and Cambridge (Europe) and Bangalore (India). ”

Recruiting for the Turin Development Center will commence shortly and interested candidates will be able to visit the Amazon jobs website for further information here.

Initially, 10 positions will be opened for speech recognition and natural language understanding scientists.

Amazon Echo Dot device

Amazon Echo and Alexa come to Europe

Alexa has a wide range of capabilities and she’s getting smarter each day. Ask her to play music, answer questions, get the news and weather, create to-do lists, help manage your smart home devices, or even read books to you.
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Continued Innovation

“We are continuing to invest heavily in Italy and are creating hundreds of jobs,” said Francois Nuyts, Country Manager, Amazon Italy. “Innovating on behalf of our customers is inherent in all we do here at Amazon in Italy and we are delighted that Turin has been chosen as the location to lead on some of the most interesting technological work that we undertake anywhere in the world.”

Earlier today, Amazon announced the opening of a new fulfilment center in the Rome region, investing EUR150 million in the 60,000 sq. m. building that with open in the fall of 2017. This Amazon fulfilment center we expect will create 1,200 jobs.

2015 was a record year for job creation by Amazon in Europe with over 10,000 new permanent jobs created, bringing the company’s total European workforce to over 40,000. Amazon has invested over €15 billion in Europe since 2010.

In Italy, Amazon has invested more than €450 million and created 1.700 jobs in Italy since its opening in 2010. The jobs are currently located at the Castel San Giovanni Fulfillment Center, the Urban Fulfillment Center in Milan serving Prime Now customers, its corporate offices in Milan in 2012 and its Italian Customer service center in Cagliari.

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