The women behind Alexa say diversity is crucial to success

Amazon’s Alexa has become an integral part of many Indian households. You can tell her to play music, read out bedtime stories, control smart lights and appliances. Indians said “I love you” to Alexa at least once every minute last year.
Women have played crucial roles in making Alexa a part of Indian living rooms. And all of them are convinced that diversity and inclusion are crucial to making Alexa a success in such a diverse country as India.
Snehal Meshram is senior manager for Alexa AI, natural language understanding (NLU) in Amazon India. Meshram built a multidisciplinary team of applied & research scientists, computational linguists, Indic language linguists, programme managers, and analytics experts in Bengaluru to launch Hindi on Alexa in September 2019. Currently, her team powers the Alexa NLU models for Indian English and Hindi.

“My journey at Amazon is an example of sheer perseverance and dreaming big,” she says. Her parents instilled the importance of education and ambitions very early on, and they set incredibly strong precedents through their lives by rising amidst social and financial challenges. She says diversity and inclusion are a must-have. “I have built a strong female representation on my team, at 37%. It’s even higher (42%) in leadership roles. In partnership with a female leader on my team, we initiated a quarterly discussion forum promoting inclusion and diversity initiatives on the team,” she says.
Ramya Poosarla is a software development engineer responsible for building India-centric Alexa experiences. “It’s always Day 1 here and I get to influence the overall strategy by helping to define product features, driving the system architecture, and help invent Alexa's future in India in the process,” she says.

Diversity of all forms, she says, brings new perspectives, drives innovation and balanced decisions, all of which are critical for the growth of organisations. “Diversity fights unconscious bias and helps build great innovative products for customers,” she says.
Teena Sidana leads the business development team for Alexa Voice Services in India. She is responsible for integrating the power of Alexa to all third-party brands, which range from audio products like boAt and Motorola to TVs from Kevin and Shinco, and set top boxes from Dish.

“The role gives me the power to influence the strategy of these leading brands,” she says. Covid-19, she notes, has been harsh especially on women who are donning multiple hats at home while also giving their best at work. “Especially in such uncertain times, it is important for organisations to step up and extend support by creating a level playing field for all. Also, we as women should continuously challenge and change the gender paradigm by being equal and not regretting constantly having to multitask, being away from work at odd hours, etc.
Dipa Balakrishnan and Seema Somshekar are focused on creating delightful experiences for users.

Dipa Balakrishnan is senior manager for Alexa experience and engagement.

Seema Somshekar is content program manager.
Balakrishnan joined Amazon in the UK office in 2014 after she got her MBA degree from the London Business School. A key project that she is working on now is to bring Amitabh Bachchan’s voice experience to life on Alexa. “This has all the technical challenges plus the responsibility of getting the experience for an iconic voice and one of India’s best-loved celebrities just right,” she says.
Balakrishnan emphasises that diversity of all forms – gender, language, educational backgrounds, etc – is important to make sure that we are not living in echo chambers, which is a real risk in today’s social media-driven world. “Diversity is important to make sure that decisions are sufficiently stress tested, with a diversity of perspectives and healthy debate. The consequences of a singular perspective can be a very narrow world-view. Diversity is especially important in teams like ours where creativity & innovation are very important,” she says.
Somshekar totally agrees. Diversity, she says, is especially important when you are creating products and experiences for a diverse customer base. “60% of our team comprises women, and we’re also a team of former journalists. This helps us see things through a different lens and enables us to create a much richer product/experience,” she says.
Somshekar joined Amazon in 2017 and was part of the team that launched Alexa in India. “We want to make Alexa relevant and enjoyable to children, as well as their grandparents, irrespective of whether they speak in Hindi or English. We want them to feel like `Alexa gets me’,” she says.