When Janet joined Amazon as a natural language research scientist in 2012, two years before the first Amazon Echo device shipped, she had no idea what product or service she’d be working on.

“At that time,” Janet recalls, “we didn’t find out specifically what we’d be building, even during the interview process. I just knew that Amazon wanted to develop technologies so its customers could interact more naturally with the company.  Given the company’s computing capacity and the enormous amount of data it was processing, I knew it would be an interesting journey.”

She hasn’t been disappointed.

Janet’s team develops new capabilities for Alexa in natural language understanding and for data analytics associated with evaluating Alexa’s performance. 

“It’s still early days,” Janet says. “We have much further to go in developing systems that can truly understand and converse with humans naturally.  But I’m incredibly proud of how far we’ve come with Alexa, and super excited about the work teams are doing to make Alexa smarter every day.”

Janet earned her PhD in Health Sciences and Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass, and her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Dayton.

When Janet isn’t focused on how she and her team can make Alexa smarter, she enjoys running along the Charles River (albeit slowly) and spending weekends in Vermont.