Amazon has exciting news for Spanish speakers in the US. The company has introduced a multilingual feature for its virtual assistant Alexa, through which it is now able to understand Spanish. Withe the new rollout, Alexa will now address its users in Spanish or English, depending on the language of their request.
The announcement for this mode was pitched at Amazon’s Echo event last month, and Alexa languages are finally ready to be introduced in pairs to three countries- English and Spanish in the US, Indian English and Hindi in India, and Canadian English and French in Canada.
Multilingual mode is an asset for the people who are bilingual and switch quickly between their languages at home or workplace.
An announcement from Amazon said;
With billions of people in the world speaking more than one language, many homes are not homogenous when it comes to languages anymore.
In April, Amazon opened up its Skill Set for developers to create skills for Spanish speakers, and they are now open to be purchased from the Skills store.
The feature is of significant importance in US, considering that Spanish is the second most spoken language in the Country. Strangely, Amazon has been a little late in this rollout, as Google Assistant introduced the multilingual feature in 2018, whereas Siri has been speaking multiple languages for a long time.
Also, with the inclusion of multilingual feature, Indian users can now interact with Alexa seamlessly. When Alexa initially started supporting Hindi, the users had complaints that they could not speak with the assistant in both the languages at the same time, and had to switch modes between English and Hindi while making requests. With this new feature, Indian users will no longer have to toggle between language modes, as the device is now equipped to understand and respond in both the languages at the same time.
