Amazon today at its event announced that Alexa will now support interactions in Hindi or Hinglish. This will let users interact with Alexa to ask for music, get Bollywood or sports updates and much more in Hindi or Hinglish. The new Hindi experience is available on all Echo family of voice-controlled smart speakers.
With this update, Alexa can now understand customers completely in Hindi or Hinglish, in multiple contexts, and varied regional accents and dialects. You can enjoy asking Alexa for diverse Hindi content such as jokes, shayaris, games, Kabir ke dohe, Panchatantra stories, Bollywood dialogues, more than 500 Alexa skills, and even spellings of words in Hindi.
How to use this feature?
- To get started with Hindi, customers can just ask “Alexa, help me set up Hindi”
- Existing Echo customers in India can change their device language to Hindi via the Language options inside the Device settings on the Alexa App.
- Echo Show users can access the settings section to change language by swiping down from the top of the screen.
- With Alexa, you can use your voice to play music, ask questions, read the news, set timers and alarms, check the calendar, provide sports scores, control lights at home, watch videos on Echo devices with screen and much more.
- Soon, customers can speak to Alexa in Hindi and English without changing the language setting back and forth
For example, if a customer asks for the weather in Hindi, Alexa will reply in Hindi, e.x. “Alexa, aaj mausam kaisa hai?” and when they ask for information in English, Alexa will understand and respond in English e.x. “Alexa, tell me about Chandrayaan-2”. This feature is specially built for Indian households where users speak both Hindi and English.
Starting today, Alexa in Hindi is also available on a range of smart speakers by Bose. These include Home Speaker 500, Portable Home Speaker, Home Speaker 450, and Home Speaker 300. Soon, brands such as Motorola, MyBox, Boat, Portronics, Fingers, Sony, iBall and Dish will launch and update their existing Alexa-built in devices to support Hindi.
Rohit Prasad, Vice President and Head Scientist, Alexa AI, Amazon, said:
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. We look forward to Alexa delighting our Hindi-speaking customers and working with developers in India to invent many more Hindi skills.