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Amazon Boosts Reach in India with Alexa in Hindi & Hinglish

Zacks Equity Research

Amazon AMZN has been aggressively trying to strengthen its reach among virtual assistant users in India for quite some time now driven by its innovations in Alexa.

Reportedly, Alexa now supports, Hindi, the regional language spoken by the majority of India. Additionally, it will also be compatible with Hinglish – a combination of Hindi and English, which has gained massive popularity in India.

Notably, Amazon’s effort to make Hindi and Hinglish compatible with Alexa is commendable since accents and dialects of Hindi vary across India.

We believe the latest move will help Amazon deliver enhanced experience to Alexa users in India, which in turn will bolster the company’s presence in the country.

Virtual Assistant Space in India Holds Promise

Virtual assistants are gaining traction in India, thanks to growing smartphone and Internet usage due to rapid digitization. Moreover, syncing of these assistants with smartphone, smart speakers and other smart home devices make daily tasks easier and faster.

Per a survey conducted by Accenture, virtual assistants and smart speakers are among the fastest adopted technologies in India. Further, voice computing adoption rate in the country stands at 72%. Moreover, satisfaction rate across voice assistant users in India came in at 97%.

Notably, Hindi is the preferred regional language for communication across India. Further, the number of Hindi speakers outweighs the number of English speakers in the country. Also, per KPMG data, Hindi’s Internet user base will exceed English user base by 2021.

Amazon is well-poised to rapidly penetrate into the virtual assistant market of India with its latest Hindi support.

Consequently, the abovementioned endeavors are expected to boost the adoption rate of Alexa as well as Echo devices in India.

Amazon.com, Inc. Revenue (TTM)

 

Amazon.com, Inc. Revenue (TTM)
Amazon.com, Inc. Revenue (TTM)

Amazon.com, Inc. revenue-ttm | Amazon.com, Inc. Quote

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Rising Competition

Apart from Amazon, companies like Alphabet GOOGL, Apple AAPL and Microsoft MSFT are also making every effort to strengthen their position in the potential virtual assistant market, thus intensifying the competition.

Google Assistant has already made its debut in Hindi and supports Hinglish. To gain further momentum among users of India, the search giant has equipped Assistant with eight different languages — Bengali, Marathi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada and Malayalam.

Additionally, the company has also unveiled bilingual feature for Hindi. Further, it has rolled out Google Assistant on low end phones based on KaiOS operating system in India.

Meanwhile, Apple’s Siri also speaks in Hindi and supports both Indian male and female voices in English. Further, it is hiring native speakers to enhance the skills of Siri in India.

Microsoft is yet to bring Hindi support in Cortana. However, the virtual assistant seamlessly translates English sentences into Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Urdu.

Nevertheless, Amazon’s growing efforts are likely to aid its market position in virtual assistant market of India. There are already more than 500 skills of Alexa, which support Hindi. Further, the latest Hindi support will be available in Bose smart speakers. Alexa users of India utilize over 30,000 skills across Bollywood, education and cricket categories.

Currently, Amazon carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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