How do people talk to Alexa?

A team led by Georgia Zellou has begun a collaborative research effort exploring how people adjust their speech to digital devices, such as Siri or Alexa. 

​For example, recent Ph.D graduate, Michelle Cohn, has been recording conversations with Gunrock, a social bot created by Zhou Yu's lab that is currently in the semifinals for the Amazon Alexa Prize. You can talk to it yourself if you have an Alexa-enabled device: just say "Let's chat!" and it will randomly invoke one of the three social bots in the running for the grand prize.  

Above you can see our microphone next to the Amazon Echo, capturing the interaction