Amazon just added India’s most popular language to Alexa

By News Desk

NEW DELHI: Alexa now speaks India's most popular language, as Amazon seeks new ways to reach more than half a billion potential users in the country. The company's popular voice assistant can now speak and understand Hindi, Amazon announced Wednesday. The language is the "mother tongue" of roughly 530 million people, according to India's latest census. Hindi will be available on Amazon's Echo line of smart speakers, as well as some Alexa-enabled speakers manufactured by Bose. The new feature also supports "Hinglish," a hybrid of Hindi and English widely spoken across the country. Amazon (AMZN) first opened up Alexa to developers making Hindi voice apps two months ago, and has since been conducting workshops on how to teach the voice assistant new skills. It's all part of a push to cash in on India's internet boom. More than 600 million people use the internet in the country, and around 700 million have yet to come online for the first time. And India's languages — more than two dozen of them, with hundreds of different dialects — are the next frontier for global tech companies. "India is somewhat unique in the degree to which multilinguality is expressed," Prem Natarajan, an Alexa vice president heading the effort to teach the voice assistant new languages, told CNN Business. "Diversity in India is expressed to an extent that one does not see anywhere else," he added. "It's very resistant to standardization of anything." Google (GOOGL) and KPMG predicted two years ago that by 2021, India will have nearly three times as many people accessing the internet in local languages as those who use English online.