In a move to make Alexa more usable for Indian consumers, Amazon has now added interactions in Hindi or Hinglish to Amazon Alexa. With this development, users in India will be able to ask Alexa about the weather, sports, music and Bollywood in Hindi and Hinglish. The Hindi experience can also be accessed on all Echo smart speakers as well as Bose smart speakers.
The news comes months after Amazon added a Hindi voice model to its Alexa Skills Kit. To get started with Hindi, customers can just ask, “Alexa, help me set up Hindi”. Echo customers can change their default device language to Hindi by heading over to the Alexa App and tapping on Language options inside Device settings.
With this update, users in India will be able to speak to Alexa completely in Hindi or Hinglish, independent of multiple contexts, accents or dialects. Users can ask Alexa for jokes, shayaris, games, Kabir ke dohe, Panchatantra stories, Bollywood dialogues, more than 500 Alexa skills, and even spellings of words in Hindi.
Amazon has also disclosed that future updates to Alexa will also enable users to speak to Alexa in Hindi and English without changing the language setting back and forth. The feature will be built for Indian households where users speak both Hindi and English.
Some commands to interact with Alexa in Hindi or Hinglish include:
“Alexa, tum kya kar sakti ho?”
“Alexa, Bollywood ke latest gaane sunao”
“Alexa, Kishore Kumar ke gaane sunaiye”
“Alexa, workout music chalao”
“Alexa, volume badhao”
“Alexa, agla gaana lagao”
“Alexa, yeh kaunsa gaana hai?”
“Alexa, Diwali kab hai”
“Alexa, sone ka bhaav batao”
“Alexa, chutkula sunao”
“Alexa, koi filmy dialogue sunao”
“Alexa taali bajao”
“Alexa, chalo ek game khele”
“Alexa, phone bill bharne ka reminder lagao”
“Alexa, subah saat baje ka alarm set karo”
“Alexa, kya chal raha hai?”
“Alexa, cricket score batao”
Hindi and Hinglish support to Alexa is available for Indian users of Echo Dot, Echo Show 5, Echo, Echo Spot, Echo Plus, Echo Show, and Echo Input. Alexa can be accessed in Hindi and Hinglish on Bose speakers including the Home Speaker 500, Portable Home Speaker, Home Speaker 450 and Home Speaker 300. Amazon has announced that Motorola, MyBox, Boat, Portronics, Fingers, Sony, iBall and Dish will launch and update their existing Alexa-built in devices to support Hindi.
Speaking about the launch, Amazon Alexa AI, Vice President and Head Scientist, Rohit Prasad 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”.