Cognigy speaks with Alexa in all languages

Language is the most natural form of interaction that is innately available to us, and so the success of voice assistants like Amazon Alexa is not surprising.

More and more households have Amazon Echo and similar devices and companies who are not available there with their products will not be noticed by the customer in the end.

But language is also popular as a form of interaction in business and industry, to which Amazon has responded with Alexa for Business, for example.

All intentions understood by the Alexa Language Service - whether written in Australian English or spoken in Japanese - can be processed in Cognigy as an intent.

The way a language assistant works differs only slightly from a text-based chatbot - with the exception of design aspects.First, the spoken language is transcribed, i.e. converted into text, and then processed similar to a chatbot.

Based on this text, the intention of the user is determined and a corresponding answer is generated. This can be done, for example, by reacting to keywords and phrases or using natural language understanding (NLU) based on machine learning.

In the case of Alexa, this is already an integral part of the Amazon language service; the Google Assistant can optionally process the transcribed text.

Cognigy supports a growing list of languages and if a language is missing, it can be generically processed.

The Conversational AI platform Cognigy offers maximum flexibility and easy visual processing of the conversation flow - regardless of whether you use Alexa’s intent detection or other language understanding such as Microsoft LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service), or the natural language processing contained in Cognigy.

Since language understanding works best with well-trained models, Cognigy already includes a large number of common languages. And even if more exotic languages such as Klingon are required, this is no problem: a generic language setting is available for these.

In the case of Amazon, this means that Cognigy already understands all Alexa languages such as German, English, French, Japanese or Spanish and is prepared for future extensions.

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Written by Sascha Wolter