You Can Now Teach Alexa Any Language You Want, Thanks To Cleo Skill For Amazon Echo In India

If you've experienced Amazon's Alexa on Echo devices, then you know that she's a cool AI, responding to a whole host of your voice commands.

But Alexa has been limited to only conversing in English/Hinglish till now. Imagine if you could talk and teach your language to Alexa, wouldn't that be something!

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Well, thanks to Cleo Skill, which just went live in India, you can do just that -- teach Alexa your local language.

Using Cleo, Amazon Echo users can respond to Alexa's English statements in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Kannada, Bengali, Telugu, Gujarati and other Indian languages. The idea is for Cleo to be a catalyst for Alexa's speech recognition and natural language understanding in the long term from an India perspective.

This is how a sample interaction with Alexa will be, once you enable Cleo skill on your Amazon Echo device and try to teach her Hindi.

User: Alexa open Cleo.

Alexa: Welcome back! Would you like to continue teaching me Hindi?

User: Yes.

Alexa: Ask me for the time.

User: Kitna baj raha hai?

Alexa: Think of an actor. Ask me when they were born.

User: Amitabh Bachchan ka janm kab hua tha?

amazon cleo skills for alexa

Understanding how Alexa grasps a new language

The fact that Alexa can learn a new language is great, but how does the magic happen in the backend? Janet Slifka, Sr. Manager, Research Science, Alexa Artificial Intelligence at Amazon, explains how Alexa doesn't overwhelm the user by asking a never-ending stream of questions, but it learns about topics in small bursts of five or six questions.

"There are a number of topics that need to be curated based on learnings from what customers are generally looking for," emphasizes Janet over a telephone call. "But we don't presume we know everything in advance about the topics that our customers want to talk about."

Therefore, Cleo will also let users decide what they want to teach Alexa, offering sort of a free form options of language learning that gives customers a little bit more control and helps Janet and her team evolve the type of interactions Alexa offers.

In case you were wondering, Amazon Echo customers can enable Cleo within the ¡°Skills¡± section of their Alexa app or simply ask their Echo or Alexa-enabled device 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.

How's Cleo helping Alexa learn faster and better

Alexa asking you to say certain words and sentences for her understanding is one thing. But I was curious to know how if I was trying to teach Alexa to understand Marathi, through Cleo, how does Alexa actually learn new words and what wizardry goes into that process.

Janet explains how all the different language speech helps Alexa learn. "We build our spoken language understanding levels for different words, through industry wide application of machine learning models where data is pooled in to learn how to recognize new speech, learn to identify acoustic patterns effectively, to help us better interpret the speech and the natural language understanding."

So can you teach Alexa to speak Klingon?

I'm sure this question crossed the mind at least a few times of every Star Trek fan, the minute they bought an Amazon Echo device. Also shouldn't the ability to learn anything be the hallmark of a true AI? So where does Alexa stand on this sentimental question?

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When I posed this question to Janet, she laughed, before saying exactly what my inner nerd wanted to hear. "Yes, that is a valid experience," Janet said, amidst bouts of punctuated laughter. "I don't I don't know how much we will be able to address that. But yes, it's absolutely valid."

Time to sharpen up my Klingon then. Can't wait for the weekend to begin.