Nt1310 Unit 9 Final Project
The intelligent personal assistant field within speech technology is a rapidly expanding field. There is a need for a Director of Software Development for Amazon Echo—Alexa to assist in building, leading, and managing a team of talented technology professionals. Alexa will enable the Echo product line to stay ahead of the software curve amongst many competitors. Software development is the full-cycle process of developing a software product. The software development cycle, assuming the software project management follows the waterfall model, includes: requirement gathering, system analysis, designing, coding, testing, and implementation. A software development team must commit to creating and maintaining (i.e. bug fixes) the source code to remain relevant and progressive against competition. The current products part of the Amazon Echo family, assuming all products utilize the Alexa software, are Amazon Echo, Tap, and Dot. In addition to the physical Echo products, Alexa is a standalone app (Alexa App) and is built into Fire TV. Amazon Echo is unique in the current market in that it is a standalone voice command device. The main competitors of Amazon Echo
…show more content…
products are Apple’s Siri, Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana, SoundHound Inc., IBM Watson, and Samsung S Voice. These are all built-in applications on multifunctional devices such as the iPhone, Microsoft computers, Chrome internet browser, Samsung Galaxy phones, etc. At the present time, the competitors hold no device similar to Amazon Echo, because they are not an internet-connected, standalone wireless speaker with a digital personal assistant (in Amazon’s case—Alexa) that can also order products from Amazon and other retailers, control smart home devices, among other functions. However, Google is currently working on a device akin to Echo called “Chirp” that will resemble its current OnHub wireless router, and integrate its search and Google Now voice technology. Other upcoming products include Mycroft, the Aido Robot, and Viv by Dag Kittlaus, co-founder of Siri. The top schools with a strong Software Development/Computer Science graduate degree program, based on the Director of Software Development’s educational requirements, include: Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign, Cornell, University of Washington, Princeton, Georgia Tech, and UT Austin. This list is ranked in order, starting with the number-one CS graduate degree program in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report. Additionally, all aforementioned programs offer research opportunities as part of their degree requirements in Speech Technology (Human Language Technology) and Artificial Intelligence. The top industry conferences in Speech Technology are SpeechTek, Interspeech, HLT Con, and NAACL HLT, which occur on an annual basis. MIT Human Language Technology (Lincoln Lab), Cornell CS, and Carnegie Mellon SCS hold specialized lecture series throughout the year.
It is important to note, due to the additional educational preferences of the Director of Software Development role, that the top MBA programs (as listed in descending order by U.S.
News and World Report) are: Harvard, Stanford, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, MIT, Northwestern, UC Berkeley, Dartmouth, Yale, and Columbia. The top talent required to meet the demands of leading the Amazon Echo—Alexa software development program ideally would have attended Carnegie Mellon for a Computer Science graduate degree with a research background in the university’s Language Technologies Institute. In addition to Harvard for an MBA. However, Stanford has the top-ranked combined Computer Science (#2) and MBA (#2) course of study. Thus, a graduate from Stanford would also make for an ideal
candidate.
This talent map is restricted to candidates that attended U.S. universities, however, it is also important to consider candidates from other top global universities such as Cambridge (UK), Oxford (UK), Tsinghua (China), Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), and National University of Singapore (Singapore). Nevertheless, for the purposes of succinctness, the talent map is limited to U.S. educated candidates based on the assumption that the Director needs a well-developed understanding of the U.S. marketplace and its product demands. In addition to understanding the U.S. demographic, a native-level understanding of natural parsing in the English language would maintain a seamless interaction between the human customer and the Amazon Echo product.
products are Apple’s Siri, Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana, SoundHound Inc., IBM Watson, and Samsung S Voice. These are all built-in applications on multifunctional devices such as the iPhone, Microsoft computers, Chrome internet browser, Samsung Galaxy phones, etc. At the present time, the competitors hold no device similar to Amazon Echo, because they are not an internet-connected, standalone wireless speaker with a digital personal assistant (in Amazon’s case—Alexa) that can also order products from Amazon and other retailers, control smart home devices, among other functions. However, Google is currently working on a device akin to Echo called “Chirp” that will resemble its current OnHub wireless router, and integrate its search and Google Now voice technology. Other upcoming products include Mycroft, the Aido Robot, and Viv by Dag Kittlaus, co-founder of Siri. The top schools with a strong Software Development/Computer Science graduate degree program, based on the Director of Software Development’s educational requirements, include: Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign, Cornell, University of Washington, Princeton, Georgia Tech, and UT Austin. This list is ranked in order, starting with the number-one CS graduate degree program in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report. Additionally, all aforementioned programs offer research opportunities as part of their degree requirements in Speech Technology (Human Language Technology) and Artificial Intelligence. The top industry conferences in Speech Technology are SpeechTek, Interspeech, HLT Con, and NAACL HLT, which occur on an annual basis. MIT Human Language Technology (Lincoln Lab), Cornell CS, and Carnegie Mellon SCS hold specialized lecture series throughout the year.
It is important to note, due to the additional educational preferences of the Director of Software Development role, that the top MBA programs (as listed in descending order by U.S.
News and World Report) are: Harvard, Stanford, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, MIT, Northwestern, UC Berkeley, Dartmouth, Yale, and Columbia. The top talent required to meet the demands of leading the Amazon Echo—Alexa software development program ideally would have attended Carnegie Mellon for a Computer Science graduate degree with a research background in the university’s Language Technologies Institute. In addition to Harvard for an MBA. However, Stanford has the top-ranked combined Computer Science (#2) and MBA (#2) course of study. Thus, a graduate from Stanford would also make for an ideal
candidate.
This talent map is restricted to candidates that attended U.S. universities, however, it is also important to consider candidates from other top global universities such as Cambridge (UK), Oxford (UK), Tsinghua (China), Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), and National University of Singapore (Singapore). Nevertheless, for the purposes of succinctness, the talent map is limited to U.S. educated candidates based on the assumption that the Director needs a well-developed understanding of the U.S. marketplace and its product demands. In addition to understanding the U.S. demographic, a native-level understanding of natural parsing in the English language would maintain a seamless interaction between the human customer and the Amazon Echo product.