Amazon Alexa To Converse In Hinglish In India
It has been a long time but, tech companies have finally taken notice of the ever growing tech consumers in India. After finally launching the Echo smart speaker lineup in India a year after Amazon expanded it to global markets, the company is doing something India-specific with Alexa. Amazon’s AI Alexa, which powers the Echo smart speakers will learn to speak ‘Hinglish’. It is a popular way of speaking in India which is a mix of the Hindi and English languages.
Parag Gupta, Head of Product Management, Amazon India said:
We wanted our devices to talk, walk and feel Indian. Alexa is not a visiting American, she has a very Indian personality.
Tech giants like Google and Apple have also seen the potential of growth of its AI assistants and the advantages of training their assistants to understand the fluidity of language and culture in India. People will be more comfortable to interact with Siri or Google Assistant who sound more Indian than British or American. This doesn’t mean that Indians don’t understand British or American accents, it simply means that the more localised the Assistant sounds, the more intuitive and interactive Indian consumers will be with it.
Google took its first step towards such localisation of Google Assistant by introducing a Hinglish speaking version of the AI in instant messaging app, Allo. Apple also started hiring native Hindi/Hinglish speakers to refine the ‘Hinglish speaking experience’ of Siri. In the recently launched iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X, a Siri user can in fact set its keyboard to Hinglish.
The Amazon Echo will soon be available to the public and it’ll be interesting to see how the experience of interacting with Alexa on a daily basis will be enhanced over the years.
