Amazon has been working on multi-lingual interaction capabilities of Alexa for quite some time. Some details of the projects were revealed in a hardware event the company had organized some months back. The plan was to bring a combination of English and other native languages in certain regions — English and Spanish in the United States and English and Hindi in India, for instance. Now, Amazon has officially rolled out Alexa bilingual support in the United States. This means your Alexa devices and the digital assistant app would be able to interact with you in Spanish.
Amazon made the announcement through an official blog post. Although the feature has been available for select users in the past, a country-wide rollout is a big step indeed. “In addition, customers in the U.S. can now switch between English and Spanish with Alexa in Multi-lingual mode. If you ask for the weather in English, Alexa will reply in English, and if you speak in Spanish, Alexa will understand and respond in Spanish. Multi-lingual mode will also be available in Indian English and Hindi in India and Canadian English and French in Canada,” said the official statement from the company.
While the ability to speak in Spanish is a common feature, the multi-lingual mode is even more interesting. In this mode, users would be able to speak either English or Spanish, and the assistant would reply according to the language you have chosen. The multi-lingual mode is now available for the US only, as the company has not said when the modes would be rolled out for Canada-French or India-Hindi sectors. These features are clearly Amazon’s move to increase the user-base of Amazon Alexa and Echo devices.
While it’s true that the feature may not be that popular in the US, a digital assistant with native-language ability would make a huge difference in markets like India and Canada.
Mitchell Landsberg is the senior reporter for News Raise and focuses on Technology. Mitchell regularly writes about social media platforms and how influencers, industry and general people use them to communicate and make money.
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