Whose Hindi is Better Part 2: The Quint’s Techies Challenge Alexa
It’s a man vs machine battle when The Quint’s techies take on Amazon’s Alexa to see whose Hindi is better.
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Amazon has introduced the Hindi language for all its Alexa-enabled devices in India. The company feels that this is a necessary feature in a nation where a majority of the population converses in Hindi.
The update has been made possible after years of research and AI-based voice training for Alexa to understand different accents and respond accordingly.
To see how well versed Alexa is with her Hindi, we challenged the AI-based voice assistant to compete with Roshun, who is the Quint’s Tech and Auto Editor and a bit challenged as far as fluent Hindi is concerned.
Last year, Roshun battled with the Google Assistant in a Hindi competition and emerged victorious by "unlawful means". Google has improved on its Hindi and also has an extensive database to develop a more conversational ecosystem.
The update also allows Alexa to understand and replay in “Hinglish” (a sentence with a mix of Hindi and English words) which is also spoken these days mostly among millennials.
The update has been rolled out for all Alexa devices. Users will have to activate the Hindi language option by going to the Settings option on their devices. The voice assistant will respond to user commands in fluent Hindi.
To get started with the setup, customers need to just say “Alexa, help me set up Hindi”. Ironical that to setup Hindi you have to feed the command in English first.
Apart from the general commands like play music and asking about the weather, Alexa will also be able to play songs specific to a certain actor or movie if the user asks for the same in Hindi.
Commands like “Alexa, aaj mausam kaisa hai” and “Alexa, koi game kelte hain” will be responded to in Hindi by the voice assistant. To battle the problem of script for display-based devices, Amazon is offering support for the Devnagiri script.
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