When Amazon’s voice-controlled virtual assistant device Alexa was launched in India a year ago, some commands or questions with a distinctly ‘local’ flavour would leave ‘her’ flummoxed. Queries such as “Alexa, what is the (astrological) outlook for me today?” Or, an instruction to “wake me up at 5 am with Suprabhatam” would meet with an honest “Hmmm, I don’t know that.”

That’s because the device was not programmed with a basic understanding of astrology or of Suprabhatam, the Sanskrit slokas rendered to wake up the divine.

Today, however, Alexa can wake you up a soulful Suprabhatam rendition or give you your astrological outlook without a pause. That’s after Amazon roped in experts in astrology to ‘teach’ Alexa, the top-selling Internet-based gadget globally, to respond to astrological queries. She was also taught about Suprabhatam.

“When we came to India a year ago, we looked at the types of questions that consumers were asking Alexa. If she did not have an answer, she would admit to it,” said Miriam Daniel, Vice-President, Echo & Alexa Devices, Amazon, one of the core team members involved in developing Alexa.

“We analysed how many times she responded thus, and astrology-related queries were among the highest. This failing was solved by roping in experts in astrology,” said Daniel.

“Before launching Alexa in India, we took a few months to teach the device about Bollywood and cricket — the souls of India — but forgot about astrology,” she said during a discussion on ‘From Touch to Talk’, organised by the Chennai International Centre. That has now been remedied.

Similarly, a year ago, Alexa had trouble comprehending some types of requests — for instance, for songs by actor Shah Rukh Khan. That’s because in the West, actors don’t typically ‘sing’ songs, whereas in Bollywood, they do. For Alexa, everything here had a different meaning, Daniel said.

Alexa has come a long way since it was launched globally four years ago, when it could respond to only 11 different subjects like news, music and weather; today, it can process 50,000 different topics, including astrology. The information is accessed from the public domain and from Amazon’s own content bank, Daniel said.

The initial 50-member team (Amazon’s Chennai development centre had a major role in developing Alexa) has now grown to thousands, including scientists, linguists, journalists and experts in astrology, who constantly teach Alexa.

More than a machine

“We wanted Alexa not to act like a machine but to be a friend, a family member, a companion and, more importantly, respond like a human,” Daniel said.

For instance, if you whisper to Alexa because your baby is sleeping, the device will know that you are whispering for a reason and will whisper back. Earlier, if the speaker’s volume is set high, she would blast out her response even if you whispered. That’s a big progress in how a machine speaks back to a human, Daniel said.

Helping Alexa is a sophisticated hardware to clean the background noise and interference, and hear the human voice that can be interpreted using far-field voice technology and natural voice technology.

“We are not done. Voice technologies and assistants like Alexa will get smarter. There is a lot more to teach them. Someday, they will approach the human brain,” Daniel said.

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