More localization opportunities exist in India
Amazon has added full support for the Hindi language to Alexa in India, making the retailer’s virtual assistant and Echo smart speakers usable to an additional 500 million people. It’s an important move for the company as it ports its broad ecosystem strategy into India. There are already hundreds of Alexa skills available in Hindi, after Amazon introduced its Alexa Skills Kit for the Hindi language earlier in 2019.
Amazon already offered its Echo smart speaker and Alexa assistant in India with English and so-called Hinglish voice support, but this covers only a fraction of India’s population. Although English is considered one of the two official languages of India — Hindi is the other — only about 10% of the population speaks English. More than 40% of people have Hindi as their first language.
Amazon’s Alexa isn’t the first virtual assistant to speak in Hindi: Google added the capability to its assistant more than a year ago and Apple did so in 2012. But Amazon realized that there was no need to rush out support for Hindi given the limited demand for smart speakers in the market. Although such gadgets have become widespread in many countries, less than 2% of households in India own a smart speaker.
In several ways, the market for smart speakers in India is similar to that for wearables; it’s currently a vanity market. Most sales of smart speakers in the country are to city dwellers and the main use of these devices is to play music. The real potential of voice technology will be uncorked when it can be used by people who aren’t yet online because of economic and illiteracy reasons or simply because they’re apprehensive of using technology. Companies such as Amazon and Google, which are fuelling the smart speaker market in India, are looking for innovative uses to make their products more relevant for non-urban users.
If Amazon is really serious about spreading Alexa across the country, it will have to also support local Indian languages. For example, 91 million people in the state of Bengal speak Bengali as their first language, 84 million people in the state of Maharashtra speak Marathi natively, and 84 million people in the state of Andhra Pradesh have Telugu as their first language.
Amazon is aware of the numbers and is playing the long game as looks to its future in India. The company knows it pays to be patient. As Alexa is constantly learning, it can be expected to respond to more mixed language queries soon.
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