Amazon on Wednesday launched Alexa+ for the Indian market, and the company said there is a lot of speech technology that has been developed here, with the Indian team creating some of the testing capabilities including making it kids-friendly.
Alexa+ is Amazon’s generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered personal assistant that is conversational, smarter, deeply personalised, authentically Indian, and takes action in the real world.
“It is very important for us to make the experience kid friendly…the experience caters to conceptual learning for the kids, the device adapts to the age of the child as well. They can do pop quiz very quickly and understand. There are also parental controls because I want to be making sure that device is secure for my child where I can very quickly with the Alexa app, understand and add certain data, delete their profile or delete or add a certain utterances that I want to,” Teena Sidana, Country Manager of Alexa in India, told businessline.
Parent Control
Speaking on the sidelines of the launch, she said it was putting the control in the parents’ hands for setting up the device.
In India, Alexa+ has been built to work with many services and devices customers already use in their daily life — from smart home control, shopping, meal planning, restaurant reservations, and travel planning, to music discovery and entertainment— all through natural conversation in English, Hindi, and Hinglish, she said.
When asked about how different is Alexa+ from other platforms, Michele Butti, Vice President of Alexa International, said that Alexa+ as a personal assistant is unique in many dimensions.
Adding Capabilities
“It’s not a large language model (LLM). It uses multiple models to do multiple things for customers and therefore, it can be a very sophisticated complex model.. We use a lot of our own models. I don’t want to call it an upgrade because it’s not. We actually had to start entirely from scratch. We didn’t consider certain point, the idea was to upgrade the original Alexa and add some generative AI capabilities,” he said.
Alexa+ works out-of-the-box with services and devices customers use in their daily life. Customers can intuitively control their smart home with devices from brands like Atomberg, Qubo, Dreame, and Wipro. They can also play and discover music, podcasts, and films in a completely different way—such as by mood, activity, or description—through Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Music, JioSaavn, Prime Video, and Netflix with the subscription fees, Sidana said.