After Hindi, Alexa to speak in more Indian languages over the next few yrs

Alexa has learnt to converse in Hindi. The efforts of more than 50,000 engineers, data scientists, language experts — who worked from India and abroad over the past 18 months — to make Alexa talk in Hindi, have finally borne fruit.

If things go as planned, Alexa will speak in Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, among a host of other Indian languages, over the next few years.

The company hopes that purchases on Amazon would soon be made on Alexa. Taking the competition to Google Assistant, Amazon is ramping up the usage of Alexa in India by tying up with speaker manufacturers, mobile phone companies to make Alexa the primary voice assistant on devices.

From coming up with some of the best Rajnikanth jokes, recipe of gajar ka halwa (carrot pudding), reciting Hanuman Chalisa, to playing tambola, global e-commerce and technology giant Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa is doing it all — in Hindi. For Amazon India, Alexa might be the key to finally unlock the whole country to e-commerce in India.