A Hinglish speaking Amazon Echo speaker will soon hit the Indian market: Report

Alexa may soon speak to its Indian users in Hinglish — not just Hindi or English. [caption id=“attachment_4110183” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The Amazon Echo. Image: Amazon[/caption] This is not the first time that a digital assistants is being tuned to the tastes to the indigenous flavour. According to a report by Bloomberg, Amazon Echo speakers are on their way to assist Indians, and not only the urban crowd. Now Alexa can answer basic questions like national holidays and festivals. Interestingly she can also help its user in making a grocery list which would include Indian spices as well. Speaking to Bloomberg, head of product management for Amazon Devices, India, Parag Gupta said that “Alexa is ‘not a visiting American’; rather she is a native ”. Meanwhile, to capture the Indianness of its audience base through language, Microsoft is working around Bollywood dialogues to get the right essence of the spoken language. According to an Economic Times report, the attempt is to strike the right chord when it comes to interaction with bots like Cortana. Their AI’s are in fact building models based on scripts of not only Hindi but other regional languages as well. As per the report, Microsoft is mixing English with Hindi, Bengali, and Telugu as well. As of now, the Microsoft Research lab in Bengaluru is using 18 Hindi movie scripts and around 15,000 dialogues to study the pattern of mixing the language. The attempt is to bring an ease of interaction for both the user and the digital assistant. As per a  **previous report** , Indian company BPL has teamed up with Amazon to announce the launch of its first Alexa-powered smart speaker. According to the company, the speaker could be expected to launch in early 2018 in the Indian market