Amazon India to offer voice shopping experience in Hindi soon

Amazon India on Monday said it will expand its regional language offering further with the launch of voice shopping experience in Hindi in the coming weeks.

The e-commerce platform has also announced that customers can now access Amazon.in in Marathi and Bengali, in addition to the five previously available languages Hindi, English, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu.

"These launches break the language barrier and make e-commerce more accessible and convenient for millions of customers across India," Amazon India said in a statement.

For the launch of Amazon.in in Marathi and Bengali, Amazon worked with expert linguists to develop an accurate and comprehensible user experience in each of the languages.

The team has chosen commonly used terms over perfectly translated words to make the shopping experience authentic, easy to understand and delightful for customers, the statement said.

Amazon customers can select their preferred language across Android and iOS apps, mobile and desktop sites. Once selected, the language preference will be recorded and remembered for future visits.

The upcoming launch of the voice shopping experience in Hindi follows the launch of Voice shopping in English in 2020.

When the feature is launched, customers will be able to use their voice in Hindi to search for products or check their order status. The voice offering will be available only for Android devices. With this launch, customers will be able to navigate to various touchpoints on Amazon.in Android app, search for products and add items to cart among many more using their voice in Hindi or English.

"Our aim with regional language shopping experience is to make e-commerce accessible, relevant and convenient for customers. Every month, tens of millions of customers visit Amazon.in in regional languages and 90 per cent of the customers are from tier II and below cities," Amazon India Director (Customer Experience and Marketing) Kishore Thota said.

This festive season, Amazon is happy to expand the Amazon.in experience for customers in Marathi and Bengali, he added.

"Since the launch of voice shopping in 2020, we are humbled to see by the adoption of voice by Amazon.in customers to fulfil their shopping needs has grown by 2X year-on-year. We will continue to focus on bringing new features for our customers on voice to make their shopping experience exciting and fulfilling," Thota said.

Amazon India has been innovating to expand the digital opportunity to both customers and businesses by localising various offerings in the areas of regional language, voice and video.

Since June 2020, Amazon.in has introduced seller registration and account management services in languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, Telugu, Malayalam and Bengali.

In voice, Amazon Alexa - a cloud-based voice service that powers the Echo range of smart speakers - is available in English and Hindi and also understands proper nouns in various languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu etc.

In video, Amazon Prime Video makes titles available in Hindi, English, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi and Bengali.

In addition, through Kindle Direct Publishing, authors can self-publish their work in five Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi and Gujarati in addition to English.