Amazon ramps up investment in Italy
Amazon has announced it is “continuing to invest heavily in Italy” – with a new fulfilment centre in Rome and a development centre in Turin that will focus on developing machine learning capabilities for Alexa. In a notice posted on its official blog on Friday (22 July), Amazon said that it was investing €150m in the new 60,000 square metre fulfilment centre that will open in the fall of 2017, creating 1,200 jobs.
The Turin facility will be Amazon’s 15th development centre in Europe. It will be dedicated to advancements in speech recognition and natural language understanding. Amazon said that Turin was chosen because of “the pool of talent available from which to draw and the proximity to the renowned Universities in Turin”.
Rohit Prasad, Vice President and Chief Scientist, Alexa, commented: “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.
“Our Turin center will play a critical role in advancing Alexa’s spoken language understanding capabilities.”
“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.”
