Amazon Alexa Soon To Speak Fluent Hindi With You – Is It Worth The Wait?

India is becoming one of the number one markets for smart speaker and Artificial Intelligence. Keeping this in the consideration Amazon Alexa's global team has started working on to include more regional language to the voice-based assistant so that everyone can get the best use of the smart speaker.

Alexa powered Echo devices have started gaining popularity in India. This, not just a wild guess of saying, the International Data Corporation report has proved that Amazon Echo devices have led the smart speaker maker with 59 per cent share back in 2018. On the other side, Google Home manages to get 39 per cent unit share.

"Yes, we are working on infusing regional languages capabilities in Alexa for the Indian market but these are early days," National Herald quoted Rohit Prasad, Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa.

According to Prasad, it is a very tough job for them to make Alexa learn Hindi because its not just a task to let Alexa understand Hindi. Alexa also needs to understand Indian when they speak Hindi because there is a number of dialects and accents which Indians use while speaking Hindi and Alexa has to understand them and react respectively.

As we all know India is a country of languages and it has 22 major languages, written in 13 different scripts, with over 720 dialects. So it's obvious that it would be difficult for team Alexa to make to 100 per cent accurate.

"These are challenges which are not language dependent but more culture dependent. We believe in introducing a wholesome experience to delight our customers and not something that is half-baked. We are working on to solve these issues in the Indian context," Prasad added.

Not only Hindia users will also be able to respond to Alexa's English statements in Tamil, Marathi, Kannada, Bengali, Telugu, Gujarati and other regional languages.

Currently, the smart-assistant Alexa is available in 80 different countries and is capable of speaking 14 different languages. Let's see when India will also receive this capability and we can talk to Alexa in Hindi. Meanwhile, the report has also suggested that Amazon has invested a big amount to develop skills for Alexa in India.