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With the Centre pushing phone makers to support regional languages, developers are also adopting multi-lingual transliteration feature in their applications.
Companies that develop apps say that with data services set to become cheaper, regional content would bring in more users. This new user base will come from majority part of India where English is not typically the first language of choice. India’s mobile subscriber base is estimated at one billion but only about 125 million users prefer English as their first language, according to industry estimates.
Transliteration apps will allows users to browse the services in the language of their choice.
“We have seen a 25 per cent higher consumption on transliterated app. Currently, we offer our app in seven Indian languages apart from English. We believe that this will get a push with data becoming cheaper and more users entering the fray, largely from middle India. Middle India is thus a very important part of our overall strategy,” Siddhartha Roy, CEO, Hungama.com told Business Line.
He says that currently 12 per cent of its total user base prefer the regional app over English. Roy noted that transliteration consumption is the highest in Hindi followed by Tamil and Telugu.
Roy said that consumers can select their desired language by updating the settings in the app. Once the transliteration changes in the app are selected, all labels, alert messages, prompts etc will be automatically changed in the in the selected language.
Online platform catering app Trainman too has its app in seven Indian languages.
Vineet Chirania, Director and CEO, Trainman said, “We realised that language was becoming barrier in accessing information. Train users resides anywhere across the country. It is with the intention to address this pain-point that we’ve diversified our mobile app offering across seven Indian languages.”
Chirania says besides investing in an engine to perform transliteration, the company has also roped in translators.
Tiger Global funded news aggregator app Inshorts too reinforces the need for a regional app. “We are looking at pan-India user base. The need of the Hindi audience is different from say a Tamil user. Currently, our app taps English and Hindi audience. We are looking to go multi-lingual as each language needs a different approach,” Azhar Iqubal, co-founder and CEO at Inshorts said.
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