In what could be good news for Indians, Amazon Alexa voice assistant now supports Hindi. Now you can ask Alexa to play a Bollywood song in Hindi. But Alexa can do so much more. You can ask for music, live cricket score, breaking news and more - in Hindi. Starting today, support for Hindi interactions with Alexa is available on the entire Echo lineup of Amazon's smart speakers.

Up until now, Amazon supported commands only in English. That, however, changes starting today. Ever since its launch in India, Alexa was able to understand specific keywords and names related to famous places, songs in regional languages like Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi and Tamil, etc. Now, Alexa supports commands in English, Hindi and Hinglish.

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Amazon Alexa in Hindi

If you want, you can even ask Alexa for jokes, shayaris, games, Kabir ke Dohe, Panchatantra stories, Bollywood dialogues and more in Hindi. Alexa also supports more than 500 skills in India. What's more, Alexa can even provide users with spellings of words in Hindi. Amazon Alexa competes directly with Apple Siri and Google Assistant. Apart from Echo line-up of products, Alexa also supports products from brands like Bose, MyBox, iBall and Syska.

“India has uniquely challenged our AI teams with its cultural and linguistic diversity. We are thrilled to bring a suite of AI advances in multilingual understanding so that customers can interact with Alexa in different regional variants of colloquial Hindi. We are also grateful to Indian customers who contributed to Hindi development through the Cleo skill,” said Rohit Prasad, Vice President and Head Scientist, Alexa AI, Amazon.

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“We look forward to Alexa delighting our Hindi-speaking customers and working with developers in India to invent many more Hindi skills,” he added.

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How to get started with Amazon Alexa in Hindi

To get started with Hindi, all you need to ask is: "Alexa, help me set up Hindi."

Existing Echo users can change their device language to Hindi. A default language can be changed to Hindi via the Language options inside the Device settings on the Alexa App. Go to Language settings by swiping down from the top of the screen. In the future, Echo users can speak to Alexa in Hindi and English simultaneously. So, users need not change language settings back and forth.

Alexa will not only understand and respond in Hindi or Hinglish but, is also armed with a lot of knowledge about topics that interest users in the country ranging from local information, to music, and from Bollywood to cricket,” he added.

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