Automatic Transliteration Can Help Alexa Find Data Across Language Barriers : Alexa Blogs

As Alexa-enabled devices continue to expand into new countries, finding information across languages that use different scripts becomes a more pressing challenge. For example, a Japanese music catalogue may contain names written in English or the various scripts used in Japanese -- Kanji, Katakana, or Hiragana. When an Alexa customer, from anywhere in the world, asks for a certain song, album, or artist, we could have a mismatch between Alexa's transcription of the request and the script used in the corresponding catalogue. To address this problem, we developed a machine-learned multilingual named-entity transliteration system. Named-entity transliteration is the process of converting a name from one language script to another.