  Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) like Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and
Google Assistant are increasingly becoming a part of our everyday. As IPAs
become ubiquitous and their applications expand, users turn to them for not
just routine tasks, but also intelligent conversations. In this study, we
measure the emotional intelligence (EI) displayed by IPAs in the English and
Hindi languages; to our knowledge, this is a pioneering effort in probing the
emotional intelligence of IPAs in Indian languages. We pose utterances that
convey the Sadness or Humor emotion and evaluate IPA responses. We build on
previous research to propose a quantitative and qualitative evaluation scheme
encompassing new criteria from social science perspectives (display of empathy,
wit, understanding) and IPA-specific features (voice modulation, search
redirects).
  We find EI displayed by Google Assistant in Hindi is comparable to EI
displayed in English, with the assistant employing both voice modulation and
emojis in text. However, we do find that IPAs are unable to understand and
respond intelligently to all queries, sometimes even offering
counter-productive and problematic responses. Our experiment offers evidence
and directions to augment the potential for EI in IPAs.
