Amazon's Alexa voice assistant now gets support for Hindi and Hinglish languages

tech2 News StaffSep 18, 2019 20:29:48 IST

While Amazon's AI voice assistant Alexa has been in India for almost two years it did not have support for the most spoken language in the country which is Hindi. That barrier has today been dissolved as the Seattle-based company has added support for Hindi as well as Hinglish to Alexa.

Representational image.

Alexa users in India can now set their default language to Hindi. To set it up, just ask "Alexa, help me set up Hindi." If you are an existing Echo user you can change your device language to Hindi via language options in the Alexa app. As per Amazon, Alexa can now understand phrases such as "Alexa, apne baare mei batao" or  "cricket score batao" or "Bollywood ke latest gane sunao" and more.

Developers are currently working on Alexa skills with a Hindi flavour and Amazon has said that its 500 third-party Alexa skills from over 30 brands will start rolling out today.

Of course, Amazon's Alexa voice assistant is present on a range of devices such as the smart speakers by Bose which will be getting the update for Hindi support starting today. Other brands which also employ Alexa in their products such as Motorola, MyBox, Boat, Portronics, Fingers, Sony, iBall, and Dish will soon be updating the Hindi-support into their products.

As of right now, Amazon has not shared a timeline on when it will add support for other Indic languages in the country.

"With today's launch, you will notice that Alexa has become more local. Alexa will not only understand and respond in Hindi or Hinglish but, is also armed with a lot of knowledge about topics that interest users in the country ranging from local information to music, and from Bollywood to cricket," Puneesh Kumar, Country Manager for Alexa Experiences and Devices, Amazon India, said in a statement.