After more than two years in the English-speaking markets, it wasn’t until 2018 that Alexa finally learned Spanish. It did so with the launch of six different devices from the Echo family, a system that has been installed in our homes over the years.
Through the voice commands We can go to the Amazon smart speaker to turn the lights on and off at home, tell us if it’s going to rain today or start playing our favorite Spotify music for free with Alexa. We can also control our Smart TV from Alexa without using the television remote. The truth is that it gives us endless useful functions that make our day to day more comfortable. Still, Alexa is not able to speak many languages, officially she can speak 8, but she is capable of learning many others.
Alexa speaks no more than 8 languages
Teaching a voice recognition system to understand a language and speak it naturally is not an easy task, which is why the Alexa functions are only available in 8 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi and Japanese. Alexa is based on a learning system and a Cloud technology that allows it to draw on the experiences of millions of users, transmitting that knowledge to all the new devices to which it has the ability to connect. There are an estimated 7,000 languages in the world, of which around 600 have more than 100,000 speakers.
Although Alexa can only speak eight languages, Amazon allows consumers to teach Alexa to speak the language they want, how? Cleo function. In this way, Alexa has the ability to collect and store words, already millions of phrases in more than 150 languages that are not within the configuration options that this intelligent voice assistant has been able to learn.
How to teach Alexa other languages?
Amazon is working to improve the available languages with which we can communicate with Alexa. One of the first steps has been Cleo that brings the company closer to more languages. If we want to teach Alexa new languages we will have to ask Alexa to open Cleo and she will ask us in Spanish to say phrases in the language or dialect of our choice. In this way, Alexa collects and storing words in the new language you are about to learn. We can start Cleo from our smartphone, computer or Echo speaker.
Through Cleo, Alexa can ask questions to the user in the selected language. Let’s say it works like a game in which each user gets a score based on the rounds completed and the number of words and phrases they are able to teach Alexa. The main objective behind this learning method is that instead of translating word for word, Alexa learns languages that she is not yet able to speak in a more natural way. And for you, what language would you like to teach Alexa?