Amazon Echo speaker with Alexa launching in India later this year

According to a report from Economic Times, Amazon is planning to launch its Echo smart speakers along with Alexa voice assistant in India by the end of this year.

This is being reported the second time, as back in February, Factor Daily also claimed the same, and said that Amazon has started the process of putting together contents for localizing the service.

But the new report citing two people aware of the development adds more weight and says that Amazon has already begun testing Echo speakers in India through select company executives, business professionals and analysts.

The Echo speakers will be initially launched with an English interface, but Amazon will later add support for regional Indian languages including Hindi, Marathi and Tamil. A multilingual interface is reportedly being developed for Echo speaker at Amazon’s Chennai facility.

Echo speaker will include all the services it currently offers in the US like buy groceries, order food, book a cab, play music and more by giving voice commands to Alexa. For online purchases, Alexa will link to the company’s online marketplace. However there are a few hurdles like large family culture and two-factor payment authentications, but Amazon is exploring workarounds for these barriers.

The report also says that Amazon will launch Echo speaker in the country with attractive pricing and offers initially, a similar strategy it used for its Prime Video service. These offerings are likely to be linked with existing users of Amazon’s services in India