Amazon’s Alexa, the most eligible bachelorette in 2019

With Valentine’s Day around the corner, there seems to be a different love story ‘developing’ in households across India. Amazon has revealed that popular voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant, have been receiving quite a bit of unwanted attention, as many people have been confessing their love to the voice techs once every minute. One can find parallels between this situation and the Hollywood science-fiction romantic drama film Her, in which the protagonist develops a relationship with an artificially intelligent virtual assistant personified through a female voice.

“Alexa, I love you” and “Alexa, will you marry me?” were the most popular love confessions to Alexa by Indians in2019. They also asked Alexa to marrythem at least once every second minute. Alexa must have received the most love confessions and marriage proposals ever last year.

Moreover, Alexa was also asked about her well-being both in English and in Hindi. At a press conference in New Delhi last year, the e-commerce giant had said that Alexa now supports Hindi, a language spoken by roughly half a billion people in India, as the company was looking to expand its reach in the nation. Bringing support for Hindi to Alexa was in the works for more than a year, company executives said, noting the unique contextual, cultural and content-related challenges that Hindi implementation posed. As per Amazon’s latest findings, “Alexa, how are you” was asked eight times every minute. Alexa, kaisi ho? was asked three times every minute.

Next came the music requests. This also turned out to be one of Alexa’s most noteworthy functions in the year 2019. Interestingly, the most requested songs to Alexa were Hanuman Chalisa, Baby Shark and Lamberghini. Of the three, Hanuman Chalisa topped the list as it was played over four times almost every time. Baby Shark was played three times every minute and Lamberghini was played twice every minute. In total, Alexa received over 1,000 song requests every minute.