New Delhi: As Alexa in Hindi celebrates its first anniversary in India, the company is hopeful that her knowledge graph will improve and it will talk to millons of people in several regional languages in the near future. Today, users from India make hundreds of thousands of requests in a day to Alexa in Hindi and Hinglish. "I can't speculate on our future roadmap but I can tell you the Alexa service is getting smarter every day and we're working hard to continue to increase her knowledge graph," Puneesh Kumar, Country Leader for Alexa, Amazon India, told IANS. "We also encourage more Indian customers to try Cleo skill and help Alexa learn more Indian languages," he added. The language-learning skill called Cleo helps customers respond to Alexa in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Kannada, Bengali, Telugu, Gujarati and other languages.

Over the past 10 years, commercial AI has enjoyed what we at Amazon call the flywheel effect: customer interactions with AI systems generate data; with more data, machine learning algorithms perform better, which leads to better customer experiences; better customer experiences drive more usage and engagement, which in turn generate more data. Those data are used to train machine learning systems in three chief ways. The first is supervised learning, in which the training data are hand-labeled (with, say, words' parts of speech or the names of objects in an image) and the system learns to apply labels to unlabeled data. A variation of this is weakly supervised learning, which uses easily acquired but imprecise labels to enable machine learning at scale. If a website visitor performs a search, for instance, the links she clicks indicate which search results should have been at the top of the list; that kind of implicit information can be used to automatically label data. Training with entirely unlabeled data is called unsupervised learning.

Your questions will never go unanswered again by Alexa. Amazon is rolling out a feature called'Answer Update' that notifies users when Alexa learns the answer to a question that it didn't know right away. The feature, which was first spotted by Voicebot, should start appearing for users in the coming days. Amazon is launching a feature called'Answer Update' that notifies users when Alexa learns the answer to a question it didn't know right away. Users can opt in to the feature by asking their Echo device to'turn on Answer Update.' Alexa will then respond by explaining what the feature is.

Amazon's voice-controlled assistant should soon sound more natural to Brits. The company has upgraded the UK version of Alexa with "Speechcons," an extensive list of words and phrases that can be delivered in a more lively, expressive manner. These include "whoops a daisy," "bob's your uncle" and "oh my giddy aunt," as well as "crikey," "blimey" and "geronimo!" Speechcons are part of the Alexa development platform, meaning anyone can draw on them for third-party "skills." As long as it's wrapped in an "interjection" tag, Alexa will check the word against its Speechcon bank and, if it's listed, enunciate with a little extra oomph.

In my last column, I looked at how Amazon's Echo device and the Alexa voice service allows you to control things with your voice. You speak, it understands and obeys. Alexa is just part of a new wave of services that allow you to control things with your voice, from cell phones to intercoms and thermostats. You can even do things now like ask her to start your car. So, how do these listening devices transform your mellifluous voice into computer commands?

At Vin65, we like to be progressive. We try new things; sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. The Vin65 support team is now powered by Alexa (Amazon's artificial intelligence device). You can ask it anything that you would have asked the previous team. As you ask additional questions, Alexa learns, which means that every day, every hour, every minute, Alexa learns.