Amazon Alexa users can soon be able to speak to Alexa in India as the company has now added a Hindi voice model to its Alexa Skills Kit. The news comes a month after disclosed its willingness to add more regional languages to its voice assistant, the first of which will be none other than Hindi.
Amazon has now announced that developers can now use its new Hindi voice model on the Alexa Skills Kit to start building Alexa skills for users in India. Developers will also be able to update their existing published skills in India for Hindi.
Alexa Skills Kit(ASK) allows developers to create new voice-driven capabilities or skills for Alexa through a collection of self-service APIs and tools. Developers will need to select Hindi (IN) as their language model in the Alexa Developer Console before building voice experiences for Alexa in Hindi.
Prior to this, Amazon revealed that in order to make Alexa learn different dialects and accent of Hindi, it had to make Alexa more conversational with Hindi speakers through more machine learning capabilities.
The e-commerce retailer also disclosed its plans to introduce support for other Indian regional languages including Tamil, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada and Gujarati. Alexa currently supports 4 languages across 80 countries and the latest addition comes as a means to attract more users inside the Alexa catalogue.
Previously, Amazon added a new Hindi language user interface (UI) to its search, navigation and customer support on Prime Video. Similarly, Google also rolled out Hindi language support on Google Assistant for Google Home smart speakers in India.