Marin Science Seminar presentation:
“Alexa, Astro, and Nova, Oh my! The science of tuning virtual assistants”
with Camden Pettijohn (TLHS ’18) of Amazon
Wed. October 15, 2025, 7:30-8:30pm, Terra Linda HS Innovation Hub
This talk will discuss what happens behind the scenes of Amazon’s voice technology development, exploring how the folks behind Alexa, etc. optimize virtual assistants for real-world performance. It will introduce the benchmarking of automatic speech recognition (ASR) from the familiar Alexa to the newer Nova Sonic model. Attendees will hear about how Amazon’s simulation labs recreate authentic acoustic environments—complete with background TV noises, among other varying sound conditions—to test and refine virtual assistant capabilities under realistic use cases. The presentation will discuss accessibility features, including adaptive speech recognition, in addition to practical applications. Through concrete examples of acoustic engineering challenges and solutions, this talk reveals some of the science behind making virtual assistants not just functional, but accessible and reliable in the diverse environments where people actually use them.
Camden Pettijohn graduated from the University of California, Davis in 2022 with a B.S. in Computer Science. That same year, he was hired by Amazon Labs to work on benchmarking Alexa Speech Recognition and LLM (Large Language Model) modalities. Prior to that, he was a game development intern at the UC Davis Sing Lab and a director of the Game Development and Arts Club (GDAC). Camden has years of experience writing code, making video games, drawing art, and more. He is also a former Marin Science Seminar intern and a graduate of Terra Linda High School (2018)!
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