E-commerce giant Amazon has reported a 21% surge in the use of multilingual mode on Alexa-powered devices in India in 2022. According to the company, nearly half of all Echo smart speaker users prefer the Indian-English/Hindi multilingual mode to interact with Alexa.
In 2019, Amazon introduced Hindi and multilingual mode for Alexa. As Alexa celebrates its fourth anniversary of launching these features in India, Amazon has revealed that millions of customers across the country have embraced the captivating experience of voice interactions with Alexa.
“Remarkably, almost half of all customers in India now use the multilingual mode on their Echo smart speakers to seamlessly switch between Hindi, English, and Hinglish when making requests to Alexa without having to change their language settings each time,” stated the company.
Dilip R.S., Country Manager for Alexa at Amazon India, commented, “Our vision for Alexa is to make it more natural and conversational. The teams working on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) continuously innovate and deploy initiatives to ensure Alexa understands mixed language requests as effortlessly as those made in Hindi or English.”
“I’m pleased to see Indian customers embracing Alexa’s intuitive way of understanding their requests, just like a family member or friend would. We will continue to enhance Alexa’s intelligence, usefulness, and relevancy for customers in the country,” he added.
Thanks to its multilingual mode, Alexa can understand requests to play a particular song in over 50 different ways, such as “Alexa, Tum Kya Mile bajao,” “Alexa, play Tum Kya Mile,” or “Alexa, Tum Kya Mile play karo,” among many others. During festivals like Diwali and Ganesh Chaturthi, as well as important days like Independence Day, customer engagement with Alexa increases primarily due to higher requests for songs related to these occasions. Smart home controls and productivity-related queries in Hinglish are also popular requests made to Alexa, such as “Alexa, bedroom lights ON karo,” “Alexa, electricity ka bill bharo,” and “Alexa, alarm lagao.”
Amazon also revealed that Indian users are curious about Alexa’s likes, dislikes, and personal preferences on topics that matter most to Indians. Some common questions asked include “Alexa, kaisi ho?,” “Alexa, kya tumhe garmi lagti hai?,” “Alexa, filmy dialogue sunao,” “Alexa, tumhara favourite cricketer kaun hai?,” “Alexa, tell me a Bollywood joke,” and “Alexa, kya bolti tu?”
To activate multilingual mode, customers can simply say, “Alexa, speak in English and Hindi” or “Alexa, Hindi aur English bolo.” They can also select this language setting in the Echo device settings on the Alexa mobile app.