Never thought I'd be teaching a voice AI the nuances of "Hinglish." But there I was, part of Amazon's Alexa team in Bengaluru, trying to explain why "light band kar do" was perfectly valid Hindi, even though no Hindi textbook would agree.

Starting Point

It was a regular Tuesday morning standup when our PM dropped what seemed like a simple request — "We need to make Alexa's Hindi more natural." Simple, right? Well, about that...

Breaking Down the Problem

First, let me show you what we were dealing with. Imagine trying to map every possible way someone might ask Alexa for weather outside:

# Just a glimpse of our initial dialect mapping
 
queries = {
    # Region: (query, intent_markers, location_slot)
    "Delhi": (
        "temperature kitna hai?",    # Urban Hindi
        ["temp", "kitna"],           # Intent triggers
        "bahar"                      # Location marker
    ),
    "Mumbai": (
        "weather kaisa hai?",        # Hinglish
        ["weather", "kaisa"],        # Multiple triggers
        "bahar ka"                   # Location variant
    ),
    "Lucknow": (
        "mausam batao zara",         # Polite form
        ["mausam", "batao"],         # Command pattern
        "yahaan ka"                  # Local reference
    ),
    "Chennai": (
        "temperature check karo",    # Tech Hindi
        ["check", "temp"],           # Direct intent
        "outside"                    # English slot
    )
}

The challenge wasn't technical at first - it was cultural.

Our research approach had to be different - we couldn't just rely on data and analytics we see in the console. We had to understand the cultural context of how Indians spoke Hindi. So, we did two things:

1. In-person/Virtual Home Visits: Through in-person vists and video calls, we observed 200+ families interact with Alexa in their natural environment.
2. Dialect Mapping: Created a comprehensive map of how Hindi changes across regions.

Observational Ethnographic interviews in thier natural environments for seeing conversational Hindi usage

Dialect Wall

Remember that scene in detective movies where they have a wall covered in photos connected by red string? We built something similar, but for language. We called it the Dialect Wall - a massive map of India with words connecting different regions, each string representing how the same phrase changed as you moved across the country.

Dialect poster we had in our office wall - each word representing a dialect connection

BERT Breakthrough

Here's where it gets slightly technical. We were banging our heads against the wall trying to create rules for every possible variation when someone said, "What if we let BERT figure it out?"

We collected the most common phrases from CLEO Skill and fed them to BERT. The results were... well, let's just say we were glad we didn't have to write another rule.

# Early prototype of our dialect-aware model
def process_mixed_language(utterance):
    dialect_region = detect_dialect_markers(utterance)
    context = understand_local_context(dialect_region)
    return generate_natural_response(context)

Breakthrough Approach

Remember when we used to think mixing languages was a problem to solve? Turns out, it was the solution. Here's where it gets interesting (and where I have to be careful with NDA details).

Here's what we did:

1. Started from Scratch

   • Threw out the traditional language model approach
   • Built a new model that didn't try to separate languages
   • Trained it on real conversations, not textbook Hindi

2. The Multi-Dialect Dataset

   • Collected natural conversations from 200+ households
   • Mapped common patterns across regions
   • Adapted a Multi-lingual "Natural Speech" corpus ¹

A/B Testing our new approach (dialect + mixed) against the traditional model

Testing Phase

This is where things got interesting. We set up what we called "The Living Room Test" - virtual sessions where we watched how families naturally interacted with Alexa.

Results That Mattered

Happy to see after months of teaching Alexa to think in Hindi (and Hinglish, and everything in between), even after my transition to the US, the numbers from public reports told an interesting story. While I had moved on to pursue opportunities in the United States, it was gratifying to learn through Amazon's public announcements ² about the growing impact of Hindi language understanding on Alexa's user base:

Uses approved public metrics while maintaining NDA compliance.

But the real victory? When a grandmother in Lucknow told us,

Real feedback shaping real solutions

Just say "Alexa, Hindi mei baat karo" and experience it yourself ✨

Want to dive deeper into how I voiced out for contextutal research mixed-language queries?

Get in touch to schedule a presentation.