Language no bar, Alexa to speak in Hindi soon

“Yes, we are working on infusing regional languages capabilities in Alexa for the Indian market but these are early days,” said Rohit Prasad, Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa. Right now, Alexa can understand some Hinglish commands but these are few and far between. “For us, it is a contextual, cultural as well as content-related challenge as the question is not that Alexa just needs to understand Hindi. This part we can do relatively easily but Alexa needs to be Indian when it speaks in Hindi as there are several dialects and accents out there which Alexa has to understand and react accordingly,” Prasad added.

Amazon last year launched a new category of skill called “Cleo” that enables customers in India help Alexa learn Hindi and other languages. The idea was to improve Alexa’s language model and help her gradually speak in local languages. Apart from Hindi, users can respond to Alexa’s English statements in Tamil, Marathi, Kannada, Bengali, Telugu, Gujarati and other regional languages.

“We want Alexa to be everywhere. The whole idea is to make it more natural and conversational with humans with new Machine Learning capabilities that we are applying now,” said Prasad who has various teams working on Alexa.