“For Amazon, Alexa is less about capturing personal information and more about how people use it. What kinds of things do they prefer to do with it? What kinds of things do they try out and then drop? Amazon wants to know what sorts of differences Alexa is making in people’s lives”

This is a conversation with Phillip Hunter. Phillip is a technology product designer. He’s played pivotal roles in consumer voice and multimodal applications at Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, and four start-ups. Phillip also led product design efforts for Amazon Web Services.

In this episode, Phillip explains how Amazon innovates so successfully. He compares and contrasts to his time at Microsoft and talks in detail about the work he did with the Alexa product. Finally, Phillip says how important it is now for companies to make a positive change for the environment, rather than waiting to be forced into change.