Amazon recently announced that Alexa can now understand customers speaking to her completely in Hindi or Hinglish, in multiple contexts, and varied regional accents and dialects. Now from today, Amazon Alexa’s new multi-lingual mode is available in India. This will enable Alexa-powered devices to work with both Hindi and English simultaneously in India.
Now customers will be able to switch between English and Hindi when talking to Alexa without changing the language setting from Hindi to English and the other way around every time. This mode would allow users to interact with Alexa without manually switching the language setting in the Amazon Alexa app.
For example, if a customer asks about the festival of Diwali in Hindi, Alexa will reply in Hindi, e.g. “Alexa, Diwali ke liye kitne din bache hai?” and when they ask for information in English, Alexa will understand and respond in English e.g. “Alexa, why is Diwali celebrated”.
Amazon believes that the new multilingual mode will be useful in Indian households where users speak in multiple languages or at least two different languages.
You can ask Alexa to answer questions, play music, read the news, set timers and alarms, check the calendar, provide sports scores, control lights at home, use over 30,000 English skills and much more. In Hindi, you can enjoy asking Alexa for diverse content such as jokes, shayaris, games, Kabir ke dohe, Panchatantra stories, Bollywood dialogues, more than 500 Alexa skills, and even spellings of words in Hindi. Get started with commands such as “Alexa, Bollywood ke latest gane sunao”, “Alexa, cricket score batao”, “Alexa, sher ki aawaaz sunao”, or “Alexa, apne baare mei batao”.
How to Set up Alexa’s multi-lingual mode
Existing Echo customers can change their device language to English/ हिन्दी via the Language options inside the Device settings on the latest version of the Alexa App.
Users of Echo Show and Echo Spot devices can also swipe down from the top of the screen to access the settings section and change language, once they have latest device software. If you are unable to see English/ हिन्दी or हिन्दी/ English as a language option in your Device settings, make sure you have the latest software update by asking “Alexa, check for software updates”
Additionally, you can also ask, “Alexa, how can I setup multi-lingual mode” for help with the setup.