“You talkin’ to me?”—Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver…and Alexa, pre-Conversation Mode, a new feature that uses AI, along with a slew of audio and visual cues, to determine whether or not a user is directly addressing the voice assistant.

When Conversation Mode is enabled, one or more users can signal Alexa and start a continuous dialogue, rather than repeating the wake word each time they address the assistant. Two months after the feature’s rollout, it’s available in the US on the Echo Show 10 device, which has a screen and camera.

• Amazon wouldn’t disclose how many users have enabled Conversation Mode, or how many Echo Show 10 devices it has sold.

Click here to read the full story—below is an excerpt about the role of synthetic data in Conversation Mode’s rollout.

Under the hood

In 2020, Arindam Mandal, director of conversational AI at Amazon, and his team of engineers and speech scientists began work on the feature, which involved equipping Alexa with AI capabilities it had never offered before: combining visual cues, computer vision, natural language processing, and contextual understanding to make the kind of instant judgment calls that humans make automatically.

• At any given point in the process, he estimates, 30 to 40 people were working together to get Conversation Mode off the ground.

To begin with, the team had to decide exactly how Alexa would use the Echo Show 10’s camera and audio inputs to determine whether a user was speaking to it. The typical way to do this is via “supervised learning” AI: using tons of examples, annotation, and a…supervised approach to teach a model what’s what. But since that strategy can be time-consuming, they decided to simulate the necessary data.

• The team sourced examples (like people looking directly at, or away from, a camera) from open-source datasets, then vetted them alongside Amazon’s user experience team for gender and racial bias.
• After that, they multiplied the examples, ultimately generating a synthetic data set of 3D heads.

Mandal said this path resulted in a lower false-rejection rate than traditional supervised methods, but declined to provide the rates for either approach, or for Alexa pre- and post-Conversation Mode. Amazon also declined to provide Conversation Mode’s false positive rate.

Big picture: With simulation data, it took about 18 months from conception to rollout. Had they gone the other route, it would’ve cost the Alexa team an additional two years to pull off, Mandal said.

“As soon as you can remove these restrictions of needing to collect data, it’s very enabling, and the technology moves very fast,” Mandal told us. Later, he added, “Simulation is actually a key invention for us in order for us to move away from dependency on large, supervised data sets.”

Click here to read the full story of how Conversation Mode came together.—HF

How does one hail an air taxi? A flare gun? Arranging a bunch of sticks on the ground to spell out “Here!!,” as if a castaway stranded on a far-flung beach? Or just, you know…an app?

For now this is just a theoretical question, but that could change in the years to come. The electric air-taxi space is showing signs of technical progress, and saw a staggering surge in public and private market funding last year. Several air-taxi makers are targeting 2024 or 2025 for commercial operations, and the European Union’s Aviation Safety Agency has said that timeline is a possibility.

Here’s a flyover of some recent developments.

Joby Aviation, a leading electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft company, is looking to conduct test flights of its air taxis over the San Francisco Bay, per its FCC application first reported by TechCrunch.

• Joby claims to have completed the longest (155 miles), fastest (205 mph), and highest-altitude (7,000 feet) flights in an eVTOL, per TechCrunch.
• Joby, which SPAC’d last August at a $4.5 billion valuation, says it wants to transport paying passengers by 2024. Three other eVTOL companies–Vertical Aerospace, Archer, and Lilium—went public via SPAC in the last four months of 2021.

Wisk, a joint-venture between Boeing and Kitty Hawk, a Larry Page–backed air-taxi startup, landed $450 million in fresh funding from Boeing last week. The startup specifically works on autonomous air taxis, and hasn’t yet disclosed a go-to-market timeline.

Big picture…Air mobility tech companies raised $7+ billion in public and private market investment last year, more than doubling the amount of funding attracted over the previous decade, per the Financial Times. And major airlines have placed orders for more than 1,500 eVTOLs over the last two years, Bloomberg reports, though they’re all contingent on the aircraft receiving regulatory approval.

As a result, eVTOL manufacturers are currently focused on getting the regulatory green lights that would enable them to realize sales and begin operating.

Click here to view on-site.—DM

Just like that, the longest-feeling month of the year is over, and the shortest-lasting month is upon us.

Throughout January, we—as one does—wrote pieces that focused on the year ahead.

Here’s a hub with everything we wrote, and below is a quick summary of the pieces.

The global battery race is heating up. We’re going to need a lot of batteries to pull off a successful transition away from fossil fuels. Right now, battery production is dominated by just one country (China), and three companies (CATL, Panasonic, and LG Energy Solution). With so many EV announcements in 2021, this year could be the one in which we see other companies spend big to try and catch up.

Smart-city projects could move from flashy to functional this year. Many early smart-city projects—most notoriously the Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto—have not worked out completely as envisioned. Some experts argue that’s because these projects focused too much on glitzy tech, and not enough on the problems faced by city residents. But now, that could be changing.

Cleantech investment is a rocket ship. Climate-tech startups made up 14% of venture funding last year, and that figure could grow even higher in 2022.

And here’s a reading list of emerging tech predictions.—DM

Stat: Tesla is recalling almost 54,000 cars and SUVs with “Full Self-Driving” software, which has a “rolling stop” feature that allows vehicles to travel through all-way stops at up to 5.6 mph, in violation of state laws. It’ll disable the fea via an over-the-air update.

Quote: “It took 50 years to become a half-a-trillion-dollar industry. It’ll take just eight to 10 years to reach a trillion dollars.”—Tom Caulfield, chief executive of GlobalFoundries, told the Wall Street Journal

Read: What does the future hold for alt-meat?

Automated security validation: US enterprises are undergoing digital transformation on a massive scale, exposing critical security gaps. Get a walk-through of how more than 400 enterprises pinpoint their exploitable attack surface to increase security readiness at Pentera’s webinar at 9am PT on Feb. 23.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

Almost exactly 64 years ago, on January 31, 1958, the US launched its first successful satellite into orbit—the Explorer 1. It burned up in 1970, after making 58,000+ orbits around Earth.

• Explorer 1 was also the first satellite with scientific instruments. Its main gadget was a cosmic ray detector, which, in addition to sounding extremely cool, also measured radiation levels in the Earth’s orbit.

Fast-forward: Nowadays, we’ve launched so much stuff into space that we need junk-removal services to help clear it out.

In 2011, electric vehicles made up an absolutely massive 0.07% of the global passenger vehicle market, per the IEA.

One decade later…And that figure has skyrocketed to 8.57%. In 2021, 6.6 million new EVs hit the streets. China (3.4 million) and Europe (2.3 million) are the leading regions for new EV registrations, and Tesla, VW, and BYD were the top selling brands.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• 5G still needs its ‘killer app’
• The global race for battery production is underway
• How the ‘world's first’ AI-managed ETF stacks up, almost five years later