Mumbai, Jan 2 :
Amazon’s popular voice assistant Alexa ended 2018 with 40,000 developers in India and 20,000-plus skills as the US retail giant raced to capture the smart speaker market in the country.
However, the Jeff Bezos company is leaving no stone unturned to gain the attention of developers and companies and retain its lead over Google Home and Apple’s Siri-powered HomePod, which are gaining footholds in the market.
Amazon is building up a base of voice developers across the country, especially in the smaller cities and towns, to develop Alexa Skills with a local touch and personalise it for Indian users.
India is the fourth country in which the voice assistant was launched in October 2017, after the US, the UK and Germany. Amazon wants Alexa to be an extension of its product offerings of e-commerce, cloud, music and entertainment. “We want Alexa to be everywhere. We want anybody, through a voice command, to do any task. Alexa’s engineering team builds alarms and shopping lists, but a lot of customer experiences can be built by developers. We don’t want to restrict Alexa skills building to only Amazon,” said Dilip RS, country manager for Alexa skills, Amazon India.
