E-commerce major Amazon plans to soon launch Hindi support for its voice shopping feature and has also expanded regional language support in customer shopping experience to Bengali, and Marathi.

With this launch, customers will be able to give Hindi voice commands to search for products or check their order status. For example, customers can tap the mic icon and say “ joote dikhao ” to search for shoes or “ mera samaan kahan hain ” to track orders. The voice offering will be available only for Android devices.

As of last year, Amazon.in had introduced voice shopping experience in English and customer shopping experience in five regional languages including Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and Hindi (in 2018) in addition to English, as part of the company’s commitment to lower the shopping barriers for Indian customers across tier II and beyond geographies.

Aiming to reach more customers

Commenting on whether Amazon aspires to add all Indian languages to the platform, Kishore Thota, Director, Customer Experience & Marketing, Amazon India said, “I think it’s a good challenge to have. Our primary objective is to reach every single Indian and that means if we are not able to reach a cohort of customers, because of not offering a language, then we will certainly work towards that.”

He added, as far as a longer term objective is concerned, Amazon would like to reach every single Indian and if the barrier to that is going to be a particular language offering, then the company continues to figure that out. Since the launch of voice shopping in 2020, the company claims that the adoption of voice by Amazon.in customers has grown by 2X year-on-year.

Amazon also launched its assisted online shopping service called Amazon Easy in 2015, targeted towards customers facing transaction barriers like lack of trust, lack of access to the internet, unavailability of payment instruments, or logistics coverage in underserved geographies.

Store owners at Amazon Easy stores help customers with end-to-end shopping on Amazon.in including creating accounts, browsing and selecting products, check out to buy, return, etc. Over the last six years, Amazon has setup a network of over 55,000 Amazon Easy stores across the country – consisting of exclusive stores that were setup for offering assisted shopping on Amazon as their core service and existing mom-and-pop stores, banking and other e-governance touchpoints.

Expanding the digital opportunity

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. Users can browse through Prime Video experience in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu in addition to English.

Besides, in the Amazon.in shopping app, Amazon.in product pages have video summaries of products in English to simplify customer purchase decisions. 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.

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