India has a massive population of 1.3 billion people but only about 10 percent of them speak English. Yet, Amazon’s Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa was available in India only one language, which now changes from today.
The company has today said that Alexa now supports Hindi, which is a language that is spoken by roughly half a billion people in India. Amazon’s executives said that to bring support for Hindi language to Alexa, the company has been working on the plan since more than a year.
The announcement comes months after Amazon added a Hindi voice model to its Alexa Skills Kit, enabling developers to update their skills in India to support the more popular local language.
With the Hindi support, users can now ask Alexa their voice commands in Hindi and it would also be able to respond in the same language. The feature, which is live from the Alexa app settings, currently only supports one voice type in Hindi.
In the coming months, the company is planning to add multilingual households support, allowing members in the family to interact with Alexa in the language they prefer. Currently, more than 500 skills on the store support Hindi.
Introducing support for local languages has helped the company a lot. Amazon last year introduced support for Hindi language on its apps and website and Amazon says that it has seen Hindi usage grow on the site by six times since then.
Alexa customers in India can access over 30,000 skills across various categories including cricket, education, and Bollywood. The company’s voice assistant is available to users through its smart speakers — Echo Dot, Echo Plus, Echo Show, and more.
