Amazon has finally launched support for Hindi language for its portfolio of Alexa-enabled devices in India. The announcement was made by the creator of Alexa, Rohit Sharma, at an event in Delhi today.
As of today, the update will be rolled out for all Alexa devices. Users will have to activate Hindi language by going to the Settings option on their devices. The voice assistant will respond to user commands in fluent Hindi.
With the update, Alexa will also support Hinglish (a sentence with a mix of Hindi and English words).
To get started with the setup, customers need to just ask “Alexa, help me setup Hindi”. Ironical that to setup Hindi you have to feed the command in English.
For the existing lineup of devices, the language can be changed in Settings.
Apart from the general commands like play music and asking about the weather, Alexa will also be able to play songs specific to a certain actor or movie if the user asks for the same in Hindi.
Commands like “Alexa, aaj mausam kaisa hai” and “Alexa, koi game kelte hain” will be responded to in Hindi by the voice assistant.
To battle the problem of script for display-based devices, Amazon is offering support for the Devnagiri script.
This has been made possible by the company’s deep-learning technology which has been constantly working with customers to learn various accents to train the AI.
The company has also introduced a feature that will support multilingual support for different members of the household.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)