Amazon’s Alexa sees 21% surge in multilingual mode usage, nearly half of Echo users prefer multilingual mode interactions

To recall, Amazon introduced Hindi and multilingual mode for Alexa in 2019. As Alexa celebrates four years since launching Hindi and multilingual mode in India, Amazon announced that millions of customers across the country have embraced the captivating experience of voice interactions with Alexa. 

“Remarkably, almost 1 out of every 2 customers in India now uses 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,” the company said in a statement. 

Dilip R.S., Country Manager for Alexa, Amazon India, said “Our vision for Alexa is to make it more natural and conversational. The teams that work on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) continuously innovate and deploy initiatives to ensure Alexa understands requests in mixed language as effortlessly as the ones made in Hindi or English.” 

“I’m glad to see customers in India embrace Alexa’s intuitive way of understanding their requests, just how a family member or friend would. We will continue to make Alexa smarter and make it more useful and relevant for customers in the country,” he added.

Due to its multilingual mode, Alexa can understand requests to play a particular song in more than 50 different ways whether it is “Alexa, Tum Kya Mile bajao”, “Alexa, play Tum Kya Mile”, or “Alexa, Tum Kya Mile play karo” and many more. Amazon said that the customer engagement with Alexa during festivals, such as Diwali and Ganesh Chaturthi, and important days like Independence Day, is higher owing primarily to increased requests for songs related to these occasions. In addition, smart home controls, and productivity-related queries are among the most popular requests made to Alexa in Hinglish. For example, “Alexa, bedroom lights ON karo”, “Alexa, electricity ka bill bharo” and “Alexa, alarm lagao”.

The company also revealed that users in India are also interested to know about Alexa’s likes, dislikes, and personal preferences on topics that matter most to Indians. Some of the most common questions asked are “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 opt for this language setting by heading to their Echo device settings on the Alexa mobile app.

Updated: 09 Aug 2023, 01:07 PM IST