Inside Alexa’s Origin Story: A Pioneer’s Journey to Foundation Models | Nikko Strom

What does it take to turn conversational AI from science fiction into an everyday reality? In this session hosted by 161 Ventures in Seattle, Nico Stroh—former Distinguished Scientist and VP at Amazon AGI and a founding member of the Alexa and Echo teams—takes us through his legendary 36-year career in speech recognition, deep learning, and foundation models. From working on neural networks in the 1990s when they were completely out of favor, to pioneering far-field voice recognition and working on the Amazon Nova models, Nico shares incredible behind-the-scenes stories, technical challenges, and invaluable advice for the next generation of AI builders. What you’ll learn in this video: The Early Days: Nico’s background growing up in Sweden and his journey from MIT to the legendary "Tell Me Mafia." The Alexa Breakthrough: The massive machine learning and deep learning pivot that made far-field voice recognition possible. The "More Data" Shift: How a key realization about data scaling completely shifted the AI landscape. The Future of Voice: The current gaps in grounding voice interface for AI and robotics. Nico's Next Chapter: His transition into angel investing and advising early-stage startups.