The Indian connection to Amazon’s Alexa

The brain behind Alexa, Amazon's virtual personal assistant, is an Indian named Rohit Prasad from Jharkhand's Ranchi.

Prasad, an engineering graduate from Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, is the Vice President of Alexa Artificial Intelligence at Amazon. Joining Amazon in 2013, he worked for three years as Director of Machine Learning, Amazon Alexa before being promoted to the post of Head Scientist and Vice President of the project.

Alexa is an artificial intelligence programme developed by Amazon which functions as a home assistant and can do many things to ease human experience like voice interaction, music playback, making to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, and providing weather, traffic, sports, and other real-time information, such as news.

Alexa can also control smart devices like smartphones, Wi-Fi lightbulbs and television among others.

Alexa comes pre-installed in Amazon's Echo and Echo Dot devices. Google Home is the closest competitor of Alexa in the Indian market.

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