
The backstory of Alexa’s Indian makeover - jsgrokker
https://factordaily.com/amazon-alexa-india-makeover-review/
======
justboxing
> “We had to think outside the box of just understanding English. We had to
> train Alexa to understand the proper noun in Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Punjabi,
> Malayalam, among others,” says Kumar

Alexa India's true test will be on how it handles ____glish (where ____ = the
base language) that's very common in everyday spoken interactions, esp. in the
South.

Ex:

Tanglish = Tamil + English mixed-in.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanglish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanglish)

Kanglish = Kannada + English mixed in.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanglish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanglish)

Even TV programs have this. For instance some of the Tamil Soap operas on
youtube have this message at the beginning

"Marrakama Bell Symbol-la Press Pannunga, Subscribe Pannunga".

= 3 Tamil words, 4 english words. 1 Tamil+English word.

Translation. "Don't forget to press bell symbol and subscribe."

~~~
onion2k
Could Amazon just treat those as new, separate languages with a corpus of
words that includes the main language plus English? It'd mean the dictionary
is much bigger but that shouldn't make a big difference (as far as I know,
which isn't very far...)

~~~
lozenge
Without a corpus, the training will "teach" the computer that an English word
will always be followed by another English word.

~~~
kaybe
I'm not sure this is true anywhere, and it's changing constantly.

Here is my favorite sentence from a German ad:

'We' eröffnet einen neuen Store für Men und Women.

(A shopping chain called 'we' opens a new shop for men and women.)

This is by no means normal everyday language but marketing is full of these
things.

(Not that all Germans understand it, I remember a TV show going around asking
people what they thought the marketing slogans meant - it was hilarious.)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Hopefully there will be more work done in mixing languages. That's a
particular issue for me with Google Now - it will recognize sentences in
Polish, or sentences in English, but... that's not how think in my head. Most
of the time I do a free-form mix of those two languages, often at the level of
an individual sentence.

(To be clear: I'm not whining. Speech recognition is getting absurdly good as
it is. It's just that being able to mix languages in a free-form way would
be... perfection :).)

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dingo_bat
> “Every 100 km there is language change and in every 30 km the dialect
> changes,”

This is so true. The term number of languages is a bit inadequate when you
talk about India. Another issue is the high amount of migration between
states. People who moved a generation ago from Gujarat to Tamil Nadu speak
Tamil with a few Gujarati mannerisms thrown in. I have seen examples of this
in my friends and I have seen the vice versa too. A Tamil family living in
Gujarat for a couple of decades. I think Alexa needs to learn the dialect and
mannerisms per user. That will be revolutionary.

~~~
nkoren
Yes, this. I'm American but have cumulatively spent several years in India --
mostly Delhi, with about 6 months in Ahmedabad -- over the past couple of
decades. It's given me the the ability to comprehend (but not really speak)
basic "chaste" Hindi, with a bit of Gujarati on the side.

In practical terms this is essentially meaningless, because most of the time,
people are speaking several languages at once. Last night I was in a
supermarket in London, listening to the staff who were animatedly speaking
what I _think_ was a mashup of Bhojpuri (some of which I could understand) and
Malayalam (no chance). Was totally baffling. Elsewhere I've seen Salman
Rushdie describe the language of Bombay as "HUG-ME": "Hindi Urdu Gujarati
Marathi English", with the apparent objective being to cram words from all
five languages into every sentence. He's not wrong.

This will be one _hell_ of an ML challenge.

~~~
jpatokal
Eh, this kind of thing is surprisingly common. Singlish, the lingua franca of
Singapore, is loosely based on English but incorporates vocab and grammar from
a slew of Chinese dialects (Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew, Cantonese, Mandarin),
Malay and various Indian languages as well. And English itself is also an
unholy mess of imports from everywhere.

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naturalgradient
Now this is a very negative opinion in a general anti-consumerist sense but:

Why does one buy items like an Alexa? I get that it performs some features, it
slightly increases convenience but it does not enable anything new or
different.

Something I do not understand about hackernews: There are a lot of people on
here who, on average, care about the environment. By the same token, there are
many users here who have an interest in electronics and technology, and are
just generally interested in new gadgets.

How do you square buying gadgets with being somewhat conscious of the mounting
environmental problems? The amount of electronic waste, the almost literal
slave labour to mine the resources, the energy necessary to transport and
assemble the parts, and the final device.

All to not use one's smartphone's assistant but a home assistant.

The consumer does not ask himself 'why do I consume', every decision is in the
framework of making consumerist choices (e.g. buy a Tesla instead of a Jeep),
the option 'I do not need to consume most of these things at all' is barely
present.

So I am honestly asking to people buying these things, what is the thought
process? Is there a feeling of happiness or joy in having new gadgets? Does it
last? Are environmental or more generally philosophical considerations on
whether you need to buy new things part of your thought process?

~~~
briandear
Alexa/Siri et al aren’t about “consumerism” — that’s the naïve interpretation—
that’s just a surface look. These devices represent the future of how man
interacts with machine. Right now, they are mostly toys used for “consumer”
purposes, but look at the internet itself — during the early days one could
have asked “why should we be building networks for the military? Dismissing
Alexa/etc. as mere vehicles for consumption is missing the greater
possibilities. This tech has to start (and be financed) somewhere: thus Amazon
using this as a tool to buy things is fine — because it ultimately will push
the future forward despite your worries about slave labor. If we stopped
buying everything tomorrow, there would still be slave labor and bad things in
the world as there always has been. People need to eat, clothe themselves and
make shelters. Stopping weapon production doesn’t end wars nor would stopping
AI personal assistants reduce some poorer people working for some less poor
people to fill an economic need. That’s reality.

~~~
megaman22
I really hope that we never have to control our computers with something as
ambigous and fuzzy as speech. It's going to happen, because people think Star
Trek is cool, but, gah, I'm not interested in it. Interfaces are getting
progressively less useful, as far as I'm concerned; people try to displace
mouse and keyboard, but it's always worse, and drags down the standard for
everything.

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kraig911
I just got an Echo for black friday. I can't get how dumb the thing is with
all this press?

Alexa play some ambient music...

"I think you'll like this... playing Selena Gomez"...

Alexa I hate Selena Gomez...

"Shuffling Selena Gomez..."

Alexa Stop

"Playing Stop & Erase by Selena Gomez"

Literally happened here just now.

~~~
nmstoker
I don't want to come across as an Alexa fanboy and defend it, but it would
help to understand which parts of your interaction you think of as dumb.

I agree Alexa Stop was clearly a mistake (albeit, not one I've ever observed)
but for the rest, it's understanding what you said, you simply have different
expectations of what the best response is. Were it a human, one wouldn't say
they were dumb, just that they had differing taste or ideas.

In particular what did you expect from "I hate Selena Gomez"? Have you seen
any other music player that handles that kind of ambiguous "command"?

~~~
rdtsc
> it would help to understand which parts of your interaction you think of as
> dumb.

All of them were dumb. That's the problem with AI conversational interfaces.
Once people talk to an "assistant" they intuitively expect the level of
intelligence of a human. Because of that, mistakes are not tolerated much and
conversation quickly goes from "ah this is so awesome we are living in the
future" to "this is the dumbest thing ever, just give me a search box and I'll
type what I need or I'll click with the mouse".

Usually irritation gets amplified because with each mistake, the AI forces the
human to repeat or explain things, which just makes it worse.

> Have you seen any other music player that handles that kind of ambiguous
> "command"?

Other music players are not anthropomorphized AI assistants. So people don't
expect that from them. Once it has a human sounding name, and you are
addressing it by that name, the expectation is that it would act and perform
like a human.

> Were it a human, one wouldn't say they were dumb, just that they had
> differing taste or ideas.

That's interesting solution perhaps, what if it responded with "I don't know
much about music, so I can't decide or pick what to play". I think some people
would have preferred that instead of Selena Gomez. Even further maybe start a
dialog about "can you give me some example of the artists or songs you like,
I'll find some similar ones". That might be less irritating than simply
playing Selena Gomez.

> In particular what did you expect from "I hate Selena Gomez"?

No OP, but I would expect it to never pick or play Selena Gomez again, unless
explicitly asked.

~~~
vadimberman
The phrase can and should be handled as a synonym of "stop" in the current
context.

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nindalf
I bought an Alexa yesterday and the second thing I asked it to do was “play
the Desi playlist from my Spotify”. I tried 5 different variants of this, and
also in different accents but it was unable to understand it. It’s cool that
they’re doing work to improve understanding in Desi contexts, which makes it
that much stranger that it couldn’t understand “Desi”.

~~~
justinjlynn
Idea... "Alexa, how do I (get you to do/ask for)..." "Sorry, I'll have to
think about that for a few minutes" In that time, a support tech reviews the
question, perhaps with some machine leaning assistance, and then gets back to
you with the answer. "(first name), about your request, you can (insert
instruction or apology)." Amazon already has mechanical turk... no reason why
Alexa shouldn't take advantage.

~~~
freeone3000
Because mechanical turk MUST be supervised. The reward is disassociated from
performance - it's the agent problem, writ large, since workers are
effectively anonymous and paid piecework. In any paper using mechanical turk,
half or more is trying to get the humans to do what they're told correctly.
(They behave more like mischevious djinn than computers if allowed to act
freely.) Just dropping in mechanical turk without a feedback system would lead
to arbitrary responses, unhandled queries, and unsolvable inconsistencies.

~~~
justinjlynn
> support tech

Amazon employees with more to lose than a few cents per hour.

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SoulMan
I was really surprised how it is able to recognise accents, I have friends
with so many different accents and it could recognise them all.

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atomicnumber1
Considering how successful we have been in speech recognition in recent years,
I think this will a next big challenge for speech recognition.

------
amingilani
I'm so happy because this means we're one step closer for an Alexa for
Pakistan.

~~~
needcaffeine
Does Pakistan have a similar number of dialect shifts within the nation? It's
at least a far fewer number of languages right?

~~~
rurban
Nope, about the same crazyness as in India.

Urdu, Pashto, Punjabi, Sindhi, English, Saraiki, lasi, Kutchi, Thari, Balochi,
Brahui, Hazaragi, Chitrali, Kohistani, Hindko, Kashmiri, Shina and Balti are
the main languages and dialects spoken in Pakistan.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provincial_languages_of_Pakist...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provincial_languages_of_Pakistan)

~~~
amingilani
Yeah, but the emphasis on Urdu as our national language means almost everyone
everywhere is comfortable speaking Urdu!

~~~
sreejithr
Does everyone there in Pakistan accept and use Urdu as the de-factor language?
Here in India, that's unfortunately not the case.

~~~
DiabloD3
*defacto

