Rohit Prasad
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Achievements
Invention of Alexa
Sujit John, July 23, 2018: The Times of India
Alexa, who is your creator? “I was invented by Amazon.”
That’s Alexa’s normal response to the question. What she doesn’t reveal is that the person who breathed life into Alexa, and led the technology side of the project almost from its inception five years ago, is Rohit Prasad, an engineer from Ranchi, Jharkhand.
Prasad, together with his colleague Toni Reid who focuses on the consumer experience side, was No. 15 on Recode’s list of 100 people in tech, business and media who mattered in 2017. Jeff Bezos, Susan Fowler, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk and Satya Nadella were among the 14 people ahead of him. Recode said Prasad and Reid had made Alexa a household name.
India-born Rohit Prasad was ranked No. 9 (and Reid No. 10) in Fast Company’s 100 most creative people in business in 2017. Fast Company said Prasad and Reid had turned Alexa into a “category-defining consumer experience.”
Prasad still has family in Ranchi and visits the city once every year-and-a-half. Last week was one of those visits. He spent nearly an hour talking to TOI on phone from the Jharkhand capital. “My dad used to work for Mecon, my grandad for HEC (Heavy Engineering Corp), so I have had three generations here,” he says. He’s the kind who makes you feel comfortable. “I still follow The Times of India. It’s my No. 1 news source for understanding what’s going on in India,” was the second line of the conversation.
Prasad studied at DAV High School. For engineering, he had multiple offers, including from IIT-Roorkee. He chose Birla Institute of Technology (BIT), Mesra, in Ranchi. “I decided to stay closer home,” he says.
He completed his electronics & communication engineering in 1997, and then went to the Illinois Institute of Technology, US, for an MS in electrical engineering, where he did novel research in low bit-rate speech coding for wireless applications. That’s probably where his interest in speech recognition began.
For the next 14 years, he was at BBN Technologies, an R&D arm of defence company Raytheon. BBN was one of the founding sites of ARPANET, a predecessor of the internet. It was also one of the leading R&D sites for speech recognition, natural language understanding and machine learning in general, and Prasad was deputy manager for that business unit, leading a multidisciplinary team of researchers, developers, and program managers on large-scale government- and commerciallysponsored projects.
In 2013, he moved to Amazon to use the same skills to try and revolutionise how customers interact with Amazon’s products and services.
Two years ago, he was redesignated head scientist of Alexa artificial intelligence.
“The journey has been exciting. If you look at five years back, talking to a device from a distance, in the midst of a lot of noise, was just science fiction. We grew up in the Star Trek era, that was the inspiration for us,” he says. Captain Kirk and the crew giving voice commands, like “Give me warp speed,” instead of pressing buttons or navigating a menu.
