Meet Rohit Prasad, the Indian brain behind Amazon's Alexa

Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa is Indian in ways you not even know. An India-born engineer, Rohit Prasad, has breathed life into Alexa, leading the technology side of the project almost from its inception five years ago. Prasad hails from Ranchi.

Prasad still has family in Ranchi and visits the city once every year-and-a-half. In fact, the celebrated engineering has completed his early education in India. After completing his engineering from Birla Institute of Technology, Ranch, Prasad went to the Illinois Institute of Technology, US, for an MS in electrical engineering. That's probably where his interest in speech recognition began.

Before working in Amazon, Prasad worked 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.

His current focus is to improve Alexa’s core intelligence, enable her to deal with ambiguous commands and to accomplish complex tasks – like planning a vacation.