Ever since the launch in India, Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant was available only in English. Today, the e-commerce giant has announced that now you can talk to its digital assistant in Hindi and Hinglish as well. The new functionality has arrived as a massive upgrade, as Alexa will now be able to cater to a wider audience. Hindi is spoken by roughly half a billion people in the country.
Now you can talk to Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant in Hindi too
Since its launch in India in 2017, Alexa assistant has been able to understand and pronounce the name of popular places, songs, and more in many regional languages like Hindi, Tamil, and Punjabi etc. And now, it will be able to understand users speaking to it completely in Hindi or Hinglish. The brand says that Alexa can understand these queries in multiple contexts and varied regional accents.
Just like in English, now you can give Alexa Hindi commands like “Alexa, Bollywood ke naye gaane sunao”, “Alexa, aaj ka weather batao”, “Alexa, cricket ka score batao”, “Alexa, sher ki aawaaz sunao”, and much more. Basically you can enjoy asking Alexa diverse Hindi content like jokes, shayaris, games, kabir ke dohe, Panchatantra stories, more than 500 Alexa skills, and even spellings of words in Hindi, said Amazon in a release. You can also give commands to Alexa in Hindi to control your smart home devices.
Amazon Alexa voice assistant now supports two languages in India – Hindi and English
“India has uniquely challenged our AI teams with its cultural and linguistic diversity. We are thrilled to bring a suite of AI advances in multilingual understanding so that customers can interact with Alexa in different regional variants of colloquial Hindi. We are also grateful to Indian customers who contributed to Hindi development through the Cleo skill”, said Rohit Prasad, Vice President, and Head Scientist, Alexa AI, Amazon.
To set up Hindi support for Alexa, simply ask the assistant “Alexa, help me set up Hindi”. Or you can go to the Alexa app settings and change the language to Hindi. In the near future, users will be able to speak to Alexa in Hindi and English simultaneously without changing the language setting. The new Alexa Hindi experience is available on the entire Echo family of smart speakers from the brand.