Amazon today has a pan India presence. It is one of the most popular shopping websites in the world today. The reasons for Amazon’s success are its commitment towards customer satisfaction and trendsetting innovations. The company which has Jeff Bezos as its founder and CEO has India and Indians to thank for a sizeable share of its revenue today. As it turns out, there is more for which Amazon should be thankful to India. There is an Indian involved at the highest level of innovation in Amazon today. Rohit Prasad is the Vice President and the head Scientist who has worked behind Amazon’s Alexa. For his contributions in the Alexa Project Rohit Prasad was included in the list of Recode’s 100 people in technology, business and media who mattered in 2017. He shared the 15th spot jointly with his colleague from Amazon Toni Reid. The Indian engineer from Ranchi, Jharkhand has joined the elite list which has names like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and Satya Nadella amongst others preceding his.
Rohit Prasad worked tirelessly on the Alexa project’s technological front ever since its inception. Alexa’s success, according to Recode, can be attributed to the efforts of both Prasad and his colleague Reid who made it a household name. Prasad handles the speech and machine learning aspects of Alexa himself while Reid is more concerned with the experience and devices aspect of it according to the Recode article. This is not the first time when Rohit Prasad has received accolades on an international platform. He was ranked No.9 in the list of Fast Company’s 100 most creative people in business in 2017 too.
The Ranchi born and raised techie studied from a DAV Group school in the city itself and followed it with an engineering degree from the prestigious BIT Mesra, a college situated on the outskirts of Ranchi. He went to the Illinois Institute of Technology from where he acquired his MS in Electrical Engineering and thereafter joined the prestigious BBN Technologies where he worked for 14 years in R&D in speech recognition, nature language understanding and machine learning. He left BBN Technologies as the Senior Director of Speech, Language and Multimedia Technologies in 2011 and joined Amazon in 2013 as the Director of Machine Learning and worked at the Amazon Lab126. Lab126 is known for developing hardwares like Amazon Kindle, Fire TV and many more. Rohit Prasad was appointed the Vice President of Alexa Machine Learning and Speech for Amazon in May 2016 and the rest, as we know, is history. Rohit’s family still lives in Ranchi, a place which he keeps visiting quite often and cherishes his roots. His yearly trips to the country could be used for guiding the youth of this country and for showing them the path to progress. Rohit Prasad’s success is something to be proud of on behalf of all Indians and he should be seen as an example for people who want to succeed in their respective careers.