Meet Rohit Prasad, The Mastermind Indian Engineer Behind Amazon's Amazing Alexa Voice Assistant

Talking to a device and controlling it through just your voice isn't as easy as it sounds. In fact, it's pretty close to impossible.

But Rohit Prasad, an Indian-origin Amazon engineer, is the mastermind behind Amazon's Alexa voice-based AI. And his story is nothing but inspiring.

USA Today

ALSO READ: Amazon's Plan To Get The Power Of Alexa In Over 1 Billion Devices And The Future Of Voice AI

Before spinning his magic at Amazon with Alexa, Rohit Prasad completed his engineering from Birla Institute Of Technology, Ranchi. Prasad still has a home in Ranchi, where he visits every one-and-a-half years, he tells Times Of India.

Like many Indian brainiacs, Rohit Prasad then moved to the US for higher studies -- earning an MS in electrical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology. This is where Prasad did some cutting-edge research on low-bit rate speech coding for wireless applications, where his interest in speech recognition began.

forbes

Star Trek inspired Alexa's creation

"We grew up in the Star Trek era, that was the inspiration for us," Rohit Prasad told Times Of India. Captain Kirk and the crew giving voice commands, like "Give me warp speed" instead of pressing any buttons or navigating a complicated menu. Touch seemed inefficient, speech was just so much more convenient.

After moving to Amazon in 2013, Rohit Prasad was given the task to bring the ability to interact with human voice on Amazon products and devices. Two years ago he was made the head scientists of Alexa artificial intelligence.

Even though Rohit Prasad had the right skill sets for the job, it was still a long journey towards giving birth to Alexa.

CNBC

Creating Alexa voice AI

Rohit Prasad says that cracking Alexa's voice secrets involved four major steps. One, the Alexa system must be able recognise speech. Secondly, it should then make sense of what's being said -- what is also called as natural language processing.

Thirdly, it should then be able to understand specific commands and have the resources to act on them. Fourthly, and most importantly, these speech detection and processing capabilities have to improve every day to understand user context better.

ALSO READ: Alexa vs Google Assistant vs Siri vs Bixby: Which Voice Assistant Is The Best Of Them All?

Reuters

And if you get to try Alexa, she's definitely one of the best -- if not the best Voice AI out there. Google Home gives Amazon Echo a stiff competition, but by some estimates Amazon controls the voice input devices market by a whopping 76%.

What's keeping Rohit Prasad busy?

Next on Rohit Prasad's list of to-dos is a particularly Indian problem. The Hindi word "achcha" sounds freakishly similar to "alexa", waking up Amazon Echo devices in households, something that Prasad is aware of and is working to fix. "We have taken steps to make Alexa sensitive to the difference," says Rohit Prasad.