From Rajnikanth jokes to gajar ka halwa, Amazon's Alexa finds a desi voice

Less than two years since its journey began in the country, Amazon's voice assistant has picked up thousands of new skills to appeal to the desis

It was in October 2017 that global e-commerce and technology giant Amazon launched voice assistant  Alexa in India. In a rather brief span, the product has embraced the Indian way of life with all its peculiarities and diversity, sometimes even surprising the user with its “Indianness”.

From cracking them up with superstar Rajnikanth jokes to providing instant solution to their craving with a recipe for gajar ka halwa or simply keeping one engaged with a game of tambola, Alexa can do it all. It even goes beyond the earthly by invoking a deity with its recital of Hanuman Chalisa.

As with any new market, Amazon had carried out an all India study before launching but the sheer complexity that a multicultural environment offers, the turf was always going to be challenging. This forced the company to keep adding to the device’s learning on Indian culture and customs.

Sample this: Alexa Skills store has grown by 100 per cent in a year. It started with 10,000 skills, and has over 20,000 skills now, from radio, to quizzes to utilities. It has ability to play music from Amazon Prime Music and Saavn, find restaurants with Zomato, buy tickets from PVR, order food from KFC. The company is working with many Indian brands which have built skills for Alexa across categories such as astrology, Bollywood, cricket, devotion, education, food and recipes.

Take cricket for example. Knowing how India is a cricket-crazy nation, Amazon realised that it could not afford to have Alexa give out wrong or delayed information on the sport. Before launching cricket on Alexa, they watched IPL matches with customers to understand how they would like to interact with the device in various situations.

“One example of a feature that customers asked for was to be notified of important matches. We recently launched this feature and saw thousands of customers set up these notifications for the recently concluded India-Pakistan match in the ongoing ICC World Cup,” a company spokesperson said.

Alexa understood that the only way to get the device into Indian households was to make it completely Indian and relatable, so a foreign accented talking device was out of the question.

The company used automatic speech recognition with multiple Indian accents. “A customer from Northern part of India is going to pronounce things very differently than a customer living in Southern India. We did a lot of work to ensure that Alexa would pick up on proper nouns — names, places, songs in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malyalam or Punjabi,” the spokesperson said.

Alexa speaks English with an Indian accent but has also been taught Hindi and regional language phonetics so she can pronounce names of important places, people, events and short phrases properly. "She can now pronounce Indian names with greater accuracy and intonations. She has also adapted to the Indian way of spoken English, which is steady paced, well emphasised words, with intonations and pauses,” the spokesperson added.

Currently, Alexa understands Indian English and is beginning to understand a few mixed language utterances. It is still day one, but you can try asking “Alexa, kya time hai?” to know about the current time, or “Alexa, weather kaisa hai?” to know about the weather at a location.

To get better insights through feedback, the Cleo skill was recently made available in the Alexa India store. It provides customers with the opportunity to share more about their languages and culture with Alexa. Customers in India can help Alexa learn Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Kannada, Bengali, Telugu, Gujarati and other Indian languages, using Cleo.

Understanding local culture and Bollywood

The company has invested a lot of time and energy in making Alexa understand about topics that are important to Indian culture. Alexa is now able to understand how there are multiple festivals on the same date in the country but they might be different. There could also be same festival called by different names in different parts of the country like Dusshera or Vijayadashami.

From asking about movie celebrities, to upcoming movies to reviews for movies or details about a movie, Alexa is learning it all. “It is no easy task given that movie titles or celebrity names could be in any Indic language. Our speech recognition team had to make ton of effort to get it right in such a complex environment, the same model is recognising movie names in English such as “Super 30” to Indian words like “Bhrahmastra”. Alexa has recently learned some famous Bollywood dialogues and she narrates them in her own style,” the spokesperson said.

Alexa key to ‘Apni Dukaan’

Last year, Amazon’s chief executive Jeff Bezos launched a grand local language plan, aiming to turn things around in India. In sort of a giveaway, in his fifth anniversary congratulatory letter to customers, Bezos even referred to Amazon.in as “India ki apni dukaan (the country’s own shop)”.

The idea was to reach out to the next 100 million customers who may be more comfortable conversing in their mother tongue. In the past one year, Amazon has been combining various elements to make its vernacular outreach a success instead of just converting English text to local languages. The product that is going through the most “Indianisation” is Alexa. Amazon Echo led the Indian smart speakers market with a 59 per cent market share in 2018, followed by Google Home with a 39 per cent unit share, a new report from International Data Corp (IDC) said recently. 

Amazon might have finally found a way to crack the vernacular puzzle. The plan is simple: The e-commerce giant will help the next wave of customers with 60-90 second videos that will have all information about products. The videos will have chat assistance from Alexa in vernacular languages.