Amazon India launched its shopping site in Hindi here on Tuesday. The move is an attempt by the US-based online retailer to make deeper inroads into the Indian market that is more comfortable in Hindi, said a top official of the company.
The move is keeping in line with the company’s increasing investment in the country, especially in the vernacular space.
For instance Amazon Web Services recently launched Hindi language support for Amazon Polly, a machine learning powered text to speech engine. Aditi, which supports both English and Hindi languages, is the first bilingual voice support service in the country.
Speaking to media persons at the launch today, Manish Tiwary, Vice-President, Category Management, Amazon India, said with the number of internet users to increase from 400 million to 700 million in the coming years, “language becomes a critical feature to shop to bring next 100 million users online”.
Users can choose the Hindi option from the language option in the menu from amazon.in website, which will be later set as default. However, Kishore Thota, Director, Customer Experience and Marketing, said option to choose Hindi option will be enabled in the home page in the next few days.
The company has been working on the platform for over seven months. While the brand names have been retained in English, details such as product information are in Hindi. This feature will be extended to product reviews, ratings, question and answers in Hindi in the next few months.
Currently the facility is available as Android app and web service and will be rolled out to desktop and iOS in the future.
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