‘Alexa+ is more conversational’: Amazon execs on bringing AI-powered assistant to India

Amazon says its revamped voice assistant has been fine-tuned for Indian accents, code-mixed speech and noisy homes, while adding memory, personalisation, and the ability to take actions on users’ behalf.

For years, Amazon’s Alexa has been seen as a device to control smart lights, speakers, and even home appliances. You can ask Alexa a question, install skills, and make your apartment smarter, almost like having a digital butler you could command. But the newer version of Alexa feels different. It is more conversational and chatty, making interactions feel more like those you have with humans.

“The experience is very different,” Michele Butti, Vice President, Alexa International, told indianexpress.com in an interview on the sidelines of the launch of Alexa+ in India.

“When you ask a question to a chatbot, you can get a very long answer. You can quickly go through the visual information and say, ‘There’s a part I don’t like; it’s too long.’ You can even, without reading it all, say, ‘Hey, just summarise this,’ or ‘Tell me more about this.’ That’s not the way I meant it,” Butti says.

However, voice-based interactions are different from text-based chatbots. “Imagine if every time you had to wait to read through the entire answer. It would be very slow. The way the voice experience works is actually quite different from the way a chatbot can answer with graphs, images, numbers, long answers and bullet points.”