Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa from the past few months is bringing in various modifications for the purpose of increasing its customer base. Now, Alexa has introduced a feature that its users can teach it local Indian languages like Hindi, Marathi and Bengali.
The e-commerce major Amazon announced a new skill aimed at improving Alexa’s speech recognition. As of now, the artificial intelligence-powered Alexa used to engage with people in English, however, now it is expanding its language skills.
“Alexa gets smarter every day and now customers in India can help Alexa learn Hindi, and other Indian languages, using the new Cleo skill,” Amazon stated.
Alexa at present competes with virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant. Cleo enables the users to share more facts and information about Indian languages and culture with Alexa while interacting with her.
In case the user wants to teach Hindi or other local languages to Alexa, he can open Cleo and be reminded by Alexa in English to respond in the intended language.
Amazon also mentioned that the process of creating new languages for Alexa benefits from advances in data availability, computing power, and a subset of artificial intelligence called machine learning.
“Using Cleo, customers can respond to Alexa’s English statements in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Kannada, Bengali, Telugu, Gujarati and other Indian languages. The more they use Cleo, the more it will improve Alexa’s speech recognition and natural language understanding in the long term,” said the company.
Cleo has been created by a team of linguists and data scientists. It has already assisted in improving Alexa’s understanding of languages such as French. Alexa users can enable Cleo under the ‘Skills’ section of the app. Also, they can command their Echo or Alexa-enabled devices to enable Cleo.