Amazon’s Echo to learn Indian languages now

Customers in India can now help Alexa learn Hindi, and other Indian languages, using the new Cleo skill. Developed by Amazon, Cleo provides an opportunity for users to share more about Indian languages and culture with Alexa — by talking to her. 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.

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, in which systems improve organically as they incorporate more data. Cleo’s availability in India will help improve Alexa’s language model and help her to gradually speak in local languages. Built by a team of linguists and data scientists, Cleo has already helped improve Alexa’s understanding of languages such as French.

One can enable Cleo within the “Skills” section of their Alexa app or simply ask their Echo or Alexa- enabled devices to enable Cleo. If a customer prefers to teach Hindi to Alexa, they can open Cleo and be prompted by Alexa in English to respond to her in Hindi. Those who speak Indian languages can use Cleo to improve Alexa’s language skills.