Rohit Prasad is vice president and head scientist of Alexa AI at Amazon. He joined the Alexa team pre-launch in 2013 as director of machine learning before moving up to his current role in 2016.

In our conversation, we discuss his long-time hope for Star Trek-like technologies, his initial impressions of Siri when it launched, his first day on the Alexa team, the reaction of early adopters, first-party versus third-party experiences, Alexa custom assistants, and much more.

Prior to Amazon, Prasad spent nearly 14 years at Raytheon and BBN before its acquisition by Raytheon as a scientist working on speech and voice technologies mostly for government-funded projects. His graduate research at Illinois Institute of Technology focused on low bit-rate speech coding for wireless applications back in the late 1990s.