Amazon Adding Voice Shopping in Hindi
Amazon is expanding its regional language capabilities for those shopping in India. Users will soon be able to make voice commands in Hindi when shopping. Visitors to the Indian portal of Amazon will be able to look around and make their choices by asking Amazon in Hindi vocally, as well as use Bengali and Marathi when searching and purchasing by typing for the first time.
Linguistic Choice
Once in place ahead of the festive Diwali holiday, users who visit Amazon’s Indian website will be able to search and shop for items, check order statuses and otherwise interact with information like they would in English or by typing and clicking. The main restriction is that the voice commands are only going to be accessible to Android users. Amazon partnered with linguistic experts to design and improve the language pack, expanding it from text to voice. The experts also helped set up the textual translations for Bengali and Marathi, finding vernacular terms when possible to make it simpler and easier for customers to understand and use the new languages. The two additions bring the total of regional languages accessible on Amazon’s Indian website to eight. More than 5 million customers have used Indian languages on the website this year alone.
“Our aim with regional language shopping experience is to make e-commerce accessible, relevant and convenient for customers. Every month, tens of millions of customers visit Amazon.in in regional languages and 90% of the customers are from tier 2 and below cities,” Amazon India director of customer experience and marketing Kishore Thota said in a blog post. “Since the launch of voice shopping in 2020, we are humbled to see by the adoption of voice by Amazon.in customers to fulfill their shopping needs has grown by 2X year-on-year. We will continue to focus on bringing new features for our customers on voice to make their shopping experience exciting and fulfilling.
Voice Shopping India
English voice shopping came to India last year, but Amazon has been investing in new features and products for the region for years. The voice assistant added Hindi and the Hindi/English hybrid language Hinglish in 2019 and debuted its portable smart speaker, the Echo Input, exclusively in India even before expanding sales of the Echo Show 8 and the Alexa Auto device to the country. The competition is fierce, however. Voicebot reported last year that while Amazon accounts for the majority of the smart speaker market, Google Assistant has ten times the number of voice apps in Hindi.
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