Amazon's Alexa Is Coming to India and She Sounds Like My Mom

Earlier today Amazon descended on India with a new roster of products for the country: Echo, Echo Plus, Echo Dot, and the new Alexa assistant.

Amid this joyous gifting is a new girl in town: Amazon's quintessential Alexa speech technology, but with a new Indian accent. "Welcome to India," the Echo in the new ad says. "Thank you, it's awesome to be here," Alexa replies.

There are many reasons that this new, accented Alexa might have been introduced to India. For one, Amazon has been pushing to conquer the Indian market—Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and chairman, credited the company's higher than usual quarterly revenue earlier this year to its expansion in India.

Alexa is also notorious for not being able to understand accents that aren't the default American one, as Sonia Paul pointed out in Wired this year. So it could be part of a quest to make it more accessible.

But speech technology can adapt to specific users over time. And to understand a wider range of accents requires a wide repository of voice data being fed into the machine learning software that power speech technologies like Alexa and Siri. Alexa doesn't need to sound Indian to understand different Indian accents.

The new accent is still an interesting move. It is deliberately posh: Buzzfeed's Pranav Dixit described it as a "nice, convent-educated Indian English accent." I described it as, well, my mom, whose accent is a combination of her Hyderabadi upbringing, Catholic education, and living in the US for three decades.

The accent is also hardly representative of India, with its 22 languages and hundreds of dialects. In some part of the country the sound we associate with the letter j is pronounced as a z. In others, f and p are interchanged. I'm not sure that this new facade necessarily goes any deeper in cultural adaptation than sounding like a flight attendant.

At the end of the day, it's clear that Amazon is courting new territory, and their marketing reveals their ideal customer. And hey, if Alexa comes with new accents that make her sound less like an American permanently vacationing at your home, it will probably be a welcome addition.