Amazon Wants To Teach Alexa Foreign Languages

Amazon wants to teach Alexa how to speak more languages and is looking to recruit the public to help. Amazon has added a new skill named Cleo to its digital personal assistant that will help it learn new languages that it does not already understand. Currently, Alexa can only speak three languages, English, German, and Japanese. It does have the ability to understand accents from America, India, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Cleo is intended for people who speak English but are also fluent in a second language. Once activated Cleo will ask you to say certain phrases or give it specific commands in the other language. 

Amazon is hoping Cleo can turn Alexa into a real-time universal translator. The new skill will give Amazon insight into the context and cultural differences between languages. This could help solve one of the most significant challenges to real-time translations. 

Amazon is also facing stiff competition from Google's personal assistant. The Google Home speaker can currently speak five languages while the Google Assistant smartphone app is fluent in nine different languages. Google said plans to support thirty languages by the end of the year and the Google Assistant will soon be capable of detecting the language you speak and answer in your native tongue. 

Photo: Getty Images


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