Amazon Alexa can now respond to your queries in Hindi

Amazon Alexa (File Photo)

Amazon, in its event on September 18, announced that it is extending the feature of ‘Hindi language’ support for Alexa voice assistant. Amazon Alexa is easily available on Echo Dot, Echo Plus etc. from where it can be used to gain information and entertainment of various genres. In the event, Amazon affirmed that people of India are quite passionately using Alexa where everyday thousands of questions are being asked from it. The company showcased this feature by asking “Alexa, Kaise ho”? to which it replied “Apne pucha, dil garden garden ho gaya”.

Alexa was launched in 2018 with over 10,000 skills and many foreign languages but the support for Hindi came only in September 2019 as users interest grew manifold in using the device in Hinglish by asking Alexa to play Bollywood music, tell the latest news, live sports updates and multiple varied queries, to which Alexa answered benevolently.

Amazon officials also emphasized improving Alexa’s understanding of Indian culture and festivals along with adorning the virtual assistant with an Indian accent English and finally Hindi language. In a press release, Amazon said that it has been a heartening time for them all through the course of developing the Indian version of the assistant. Alexa also features an easy transformation option for the users to switch from Hindi to English and vice-versa.

By introducing enhanced improvements in Alexa which may count over 60, the virtual assistant’s Natural Language Understanding has been tremendously modified to work as per users’ commands. This will further ease Alexa’s response towards them as more than 60% of users prefer to speak with their virtual assistant in Hinglish. The company said that such requests have only helped Alexa to advance its deep neural networks, multi-dialect training, and semi-supervised learning to minimize the speech errors by almost 40% while artificial intelligence has played a significant role in advancing its vocabulary by 30%.

Finally, Amazon said that it is an initial phase for Alexa in Hindi, so there are challenges that have to be tackled, provided that the question asked by Hindi speaking users are much more complex than those asked by English speaking consumers. This makes it difficult for the team behind the assistant to algorithmically decipher and provide optimum results. Nevertheless, Amazon is optimistic about Alexa’s future prospects, as, with the introduction of Hindi, it will be able to reach a much wider scale of audiences.

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