Coming weekend, the renowned American e-commerce company, Amazon is planning over to ship Echo speakers in India. About a year ago, team of linguists, speech scientists, developers and engineers have amended and provided a local makeover to the Alexa virtual assistant that powers the speakers.
The center of attraction is the authentic Indian accent used by Alexa. She wishes the general festivals to its listeners and can add jeera (cumin), haldi (turmeric) and else to the shopping list. Also, Alexa comes with all those humorous cricket jokes.
“We wanted our devices to talk, walk and feel Indian,” said Parag
Gupta, head of product management for Amazon Devices in India, “Alexa is not a visiting American, she has a very Indian personality”.
India with its vast population has become an important marketing site. Technology giants from Apple Inc. and Google are targeting this nation of 1.3 billion with the advent of trained virtual assistants who sound more like Indians.
Current Indian work force isn’t completely digitalized and hence, flawless English isn’t something that usually work here. Thus, Hinglish has been put to use which combines both languages and makes things even more comprehensible.
Last year, Apple was looking out for native Hindi/English speakers to help them evolve Siri by crafting culturally apt. dialog for India. With the latest Apple handsets (iPhone 8 and iPhone X), users can switch their keyboards to the all-new Hinglish.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has pledged to invest $5 billion in India as he battles Flipkart Services for supremacy, with a big proportion going into thousands of working hours to conquer language barrier.
Amazon has incorporated Indian local humor, pauses intonations in its Echo devices. Alexa fields a query of “Alexa, should I carry an umbrella today?” by instantly providing weather forecast. She is even capable of reconciling stories from the Panchatantra fables and the Bollywood music as well.
“We don’t want local customers to have to change their behavior to use our devices,” Gupta said.
For Indian market, Amazon has slashed 30% off the price tags.
Amazon has also worked with third-party developers who have built more than 10,000 extensions in order to broaden the range of convenience for Alexa. Now, she would even be able to suggest the best Hyderabad biryani.
A report from Google revealed that over 234 million Indian language users have overtaken its 175 million English Internet users. A large proportion of it prefers speaking rather than typing. It’s been estimated that in the next 4 years, 534 million Indian language speakers will overtake the English speakers on the Internet.
If a virtual assistant goes trendy, users will gravitate toward it and thus, pushing down the companies to an inevitable pit of competition. Still, it’s been viewed like an American robot or chatbot that can never work.