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Amazon intent on making Alexa "as Indian as it gets"

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Amazon intent on making Alexa "as Indian as it gets" Sreeraman Thiagarajan is the cofounder of Mumbai-based software firm Agrahyah Technologies. His newest obsession is creating voice-based apps for Alexa, the digital assistant powering Amazon’s Echo smart speakers. The first Alexa app he developed was a Bollywood celebrity quiz.

Thiagarajan is part of a growing community of more than 15,000 independent developers familiarising Alexa with India’s myriad obsessions and cultures. He has developed four Alexa apps since Amazon launched Echo in India in November, including one that utters Buddhist quotes on command.

The localised array of voice-based Alexa apps, or what Amazon calls ‘skills’, covers a spectrum of typically Indian interests — chants for cricket enthusiasts that go ‘Sachin… Sachin’; recitations of the Gayatri Mantra, Vishnu Sahasranamam and Surahs from the Quran; daily horoscopes; Bollywood quizzes; Indian flute music and even cooking instructions based on late celebrity chef Tarla Dalal’s recipes.

For Amazon, customising Alexa for India is crucial given the huge user traffic and data it can generate from the country. “Alexa is not going to be a visiting American who is going to come to India for a few days and go back. She is as Indian as it gets,” said Dilip RS, country manager, Alexa Skills, India.

Amazon intent on making Alexa "as Indian as it gets" Building a voice app is a different ballgame as compared with building a regular Android or iOS app. A developer needs to build a mental roadmap of how a user could potentially converse with a voice app. “There is no visual element for these ‘skills’. You have to plan the conversation in your head and translate it into code. You have to think of utterances. What is the user going to say?” said Priyankar Kumar, a third-year computer science student at a private college who has developed seven apps for Alexa so far, including an expense tracker.

To develop this nascent developer ecosystem in India, Amazon hosts monthly theme-based contests as well as webinars, YouTube videos and meetups. It is presently running an IPL ‘skills’ contest and before the Union Budget for 2018-19, ran a financial ‘skills’ contest. Amazon, globally, has also launched a tool for developers. “We have a self-explanatory skill-builder tool of sorts. We launched a new version of it last month. It is as simple as drag and drop. For example, if you want to build a joke ‘skill’, you can use our templates and change the content. The entire ‘skill’ gets published in five minutes,” said Dilip.

Amazon is also running an Alexa hackathon with innovation and talent management company HackerEarth.

“The idea is to educate the developer community. A lot of ‘skills’ will be used by Indian users. It will enrich the way we interact with machines,” said Vivek Prakash, CTO of HackerEarth.

Google, too, is working on creating a developer ecosystem in India for its smart speaker, Google Home, that it is preparing to launch in the country. It has invited developers to build apps on its ‘Actions on Google’ platform. ‘Actions’ is Google’s equivalent to Alexa Skills.

Even so, these are still early days and a lot more has to be done to make Alexa truly ‘Indian’, like making the device understand more the Indian context and the country’s many languages and dialects. “We also look for language modelling. Amazon does a lot of heavy lifting here. We want to ensure that the ‘skills’ are customised for India in terms of spoken-language model perspective. We check for local policies and compliance… any ‘skill’ that violates those does not go through,” said Dilip.



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