As the festive season kicks in India, e-commerce platforms are gearing up for big shopping bonanzas. Amazon India is no exception. It today announced that in the coming weeks it will launch voice shopping experience in a bid to break the language barrier and make e-commerce experience easier. Simultaneously, it 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.
In general, both in India and elsewhere, Amazon is planning to make Alexa, the Artificial Intelligence that powers Amazon Echo, into a robust voice shopping platform.
Amazon had last year launched Voice shopping in English. Now, with this impending launch, customers will be able to use their voice in Hindi to search for products or check their order status.
In a press release, Amazon said that “for example, customers can tap the mic icon and say “joote dikhao” to search for shoes or “mera samaan kahan hain” to track orders.”
To access the voice shopping experience in Hindi, customers will need to update their Amazon app via Play Store. Post update, customers can open the app, set their preferred app language to Hindi and click on the mic icon displayed beside the search bar. The voice offering will be available only for Android devices.
Kishore Thota, Director, Customer Experience & Marketing, Amazon India, said: “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.”
How to set your preferred regional language on Amazon.in
For the launch of Amazon.in in Marathi and Bengali, Amazon said that it 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 and also easy to understand.
Amazon customers can select their preferred language in a few simple steps across Android and iOS apps, mobile and desktop sites. Once selected, the language preference will be recorded and remembered for future visits.
Alexa is available in English and Hindi and also understands proper nouns in various languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu.
In addition to these, 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.
