Amazon Becomes 1st To Launch Hindi Portal; Google Assistant Turns Marathi!
Amazon wants to focus on 100 million Hindi speaking online shoppers in India.
September is turning out to the month of the vernacular boom in India.
Two of the biggest Internet companies: Amazon and Google, both have announced some massive programs to tap the regional language speakers in India.
It seems that the future of the Internet in India lies with regional languages.
Amazon India Website Will Be In Hindi As Well!
Beating Flipkart, Paytm and others, Amazon India has become the first major ecommerce portal to provide Hindi version of their portal.
This is indeed interesting because other ‘Indian’ e-commerce portals such as Flipkart, Paytm and Snapdeal hasn’t yet offered their e-commerce services in the Hindi language.
Just for information, Snapdeal did attempt to offer their deals and products in Hindi and Telugu, in 2015 but the idea was dropped due to lack of traffic.
But Amazon has some other plans.
While announcing the launch, Manish Tiwary, vice president (category management) at Amazon India said, “My mother keeps saying why we cannot shop in Hindi. This is the customer feedback we have been getting and it was time to move towards the next evolution,”
Amazon wishes to target 100 million Hindi speaking ecommerce users from small towns and cities, where English hasn’t become the mainstream language to shop.
The timing is really crucial, as the peak season of festivals is about to start in the month of October, and Amazon’s Hindi version of their portal can prove to the wild card, if we discount the aspect of offers and deals.
As of now, Amazon’s Hindi version would be available on mobile (app and mobile website). After Hindi, Amazon India plans to offer their services in Tamil and Bengali as well.
Google Assistant Now In Marathi!
Meanwhile not to be left behind, Google too has announced some major shift towards vernacular languages.
In the recently concluded Google for India event, they announced that Google Assistant would be now offered in the Marathi language as well.
As of now, Google’s mobile-based assistant is available in English and Hindi.
But very soon, Google Assistant will be available in 7 Indian languages: Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Urdu and Malayalam.
As per Pravir Gupta, Director of Software Engineering, Google Assistant, the usage of Google Assistant has tripled in the last 12 months. Over 100,000 queries related with Cricket alone were asked to Google Assistant.
Google Assistant is being empowered with Machine Learning and AI, and now, users won’t be required to manually change their language – Google Assistant will automatically detect the language, and respond accordingly.
Image Source: https://www.shethepeople.tv/news/rajasthans-e-sakhi-programme-digital-literacy
