Rohit Prasad: The Indian engineer who is the brain behind Alexa

罗希特•普拉萨德：Alexa背后的印度工程师

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.

Alexa，谁是你的创造者? “我是亚马逊开发的。”这是Alexa对这个问题的正常回复。但她没有提到的是，从五年前开始，那个给Alexa注入生命并在技术方面引领前进的人，正是来自贾坎德邦兰契市的工程师罗希特•普拉萨德。

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.

普拉萨德和他的同事托尼·里德专注于消费者体验方面，在Recode 2017年的100位重要科技、商业和媒体人士中排名第15。

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.

杰夫·贝佐斯、苏珊·福勒、马克·扎克伯格、蒂姆·库克、桑德尔·皮查伊、埃隆·穆斯克和萨蒂亚·纳德拉是位列他之前的14人之列。Recode说，Prasad和Reid让Alexa成为家喻户晓的名字。

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.”

出生于印度的罗塞特•普拉萨德在《快速公司》2017年100位最具创造力的商界人士中排名第九(里德排名第十)。Fast Company表示，普拉萨德和里德已经把Alexa变成了“定义类别的消费者体验”。

Prasad still has family in Ranchi and visits the city once every year-and-a-half. Last week was one of those visits. On Thursday, 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.

普拉萨德仍然有家人住在兰契，每一年半都会回这个城市一趟。上周他再度返回兰契。周四，他在贾德坎邦首府接受了印度时报的电话采访，谈了大约一个小时。“我爸爸以前在Mecon工作，我的祖父在HEC重型工程公司工作，所以我们家在这里居住了三代，”他说。他是那种让你感觉舒服的人。“我还是会关注印度时报。这是我了解印度情况的头号新闻来源。普拉萨德在DAV高中学习。他收到过多所学校工程专业的邀请，包括来自印度理工学院-鲁尔基分校。但是他选择了位于兰契梅斯拉的伯拉理工学院。他说:“我决定待在离家更近的地方。”

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.

1997年，他完成了电子与通信工程，然后去了美国伊利诺伊理工学院攻读电子工程硕士学位，在那里，他对无线应用的低比特率语音编码进行了特别的研究。他可能由此开始对语音识别表现出了兴趣。

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.

在接下来的14年里，他一直在国防公司雷声的研发部门BBN技术公司工作。BBN是阿帕网络（因特网的前身）的创始网站之一。

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 commercially-sponsored projects.

这个网站也是语音识别、自然语言理解和机器学习方面的领先研发网站之一，普拉萨德是该业务部门的副经理，领导着一个由研究人员、开发人员和项目经理组成的多学科团队，负责政府和商业资助的大型项目。

In 2013, he moved to Amazon to use the same skills to try and revolutionise how customers interact with Amazon’s products and services.

2013年，他搬到了亚马逊，用同样的技能尝试改变客户与亚马逊产品和服务的互动方式。

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.

两年前，他被重新任命为Alexa人工智能的首席科学家。“这是一段令人兴奋的旅程。回首五年前，与电子设备进行交谈仅仅是科幻小说的场景。我们是看着《星际迷航》长大的，那是我们的灵感来源。”

Captain Kirk and the crew giving voice commands, like “Give me warp speed,” instead of pressing buttons or navigating a menu.

柯克船长和船员们会通过语音，比如“全速前进”来下达指令，而不是通过按下按钮或导航菜单来完成。

印度时报网友评论：

原创翻译：三泰虎  http://www.santaihu.com/45636.html 译者：Joyceliu

外文：https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/nri/us-canada-news/rohit-prasad-the-indian-engineer-who-is-the-brain-behind-alexa/articleshow/65096284.cms

Majority of our Politicians have poor innovative skills except they will super innovate to loot the county with their corruption techniques innovation skills. So if this engineer would have got a job in India he would have ended in a routine job wasting his skills. Reservation should be abolished as it is more than 70 years since independence. Will the looting politicians abolish reservation??? doubtful as this serves their vote gathering purpose.

我们的大多数政客除了在腐败方面极具创新力、掠夺这个国家之外，在其他方面都非常缺乏创新的技能。因此，如果这位工程师在印度找工作，他只会在日常工作中埋没自己的才华。自从独立以来已有70多年的历史，预留制度应该被废除。掠夺成性的政客会废除预留制吗?我非常怀疑，这样做才能达成他们收集选票的目的。

John Jani Janardan - Hamunaptra - 5 hours ago -Follow

He must be thanking his stars he left this country early after his undergraduate and never experienced the ordeal of woking in India that his dad and grandad had to endure. India rewards mediocrity and corruption and punishes integrity and merit. So very very few educated and creative people will have any nationalistic feelings for this wretched land and people.

他必须感谢他在本科毕业后就离开了这个国家，从未经历过他的父亲和祖父必须忍受的在印度的艰难困苦。印度奖励平庸和腐败，惩罚正直和功绩。所以很少有受过教育和有创造力的人会对这片贫瘠的土地和人民产生感情。

satwinder singh - 5 hours ago -Follow

Alexa, why do people leave india?

Alexa，为什么人们要离开印度?

Human Voice - 5 hours ago -Follow

what is the point he is American, if he would have been in Ranchi either he would be a corrupt engineer or Chara chor

他是美国人，说这些有什么意义呢?如果他在兰契，他搞不好就是个堕落的工程师

Rop Hod - 4 hours ago -Follow

This shows that Indian mind with hard work can excel in an atmosphere which encourages excellence. India is changing for the better, albeit slowly. That''s the way de ocracy works. More Make in India, with research to make better products, which can be sold worldwide, is the way to go for consumers.

这表明，勤奋工作的印度人能够在鼓励优秀的氛围中脱颖而出。尽管步伐缓慢，但印度正在向更好的方向发展。这就是民*的运作方式。我们应该在印度生产更多的产品，研发出更好的产品，向全世界销售，这是争取消费者的好途径。

Anthony - goa - 53 mins ago -Follow

In India he did not get job because his deserving post was given to some useless reservation category people.

在印度，他是找不到工作的，因为他该得的职位会被分配给一些一无是处的预留人员。