A few months back it was the first anniversary of Alexa in India and did you know that in just a year, Indians have woken up with a good morning chat with Alexa a million times. This last year, India has showered a lot of love and attention on Alexa. Not only have users asked her some of life’s most crucial questions - like why the sky is blue or how much Virat Kohli scored in the last IPL match - they have also professed their love to Alexa at least once every minute. And it didn’t just stop there! Alexa gets propositioned for marriage once every three minutes.
The Alexa Skills store has grown by 100 per cent in just one year. Today, with 20,000 unique skills, Alexa can do a whole lot more than she started with. Alexa-powered smart homes were once just about the lights. She can now control home security cameras, ACs, TVs, vacuum cleaners, air purifiers – you name it! Engaged users are the reason Alexa is always learning. Their love – your love – makes her better! Stalwarts from India’s storytelling tradition have joined in to make learning, be it about nursery rhymes or animal kingdom or Indian mythology, fun and interactive with Alexa. Responsible for making Indian history and mythology accessible and fun for generations of children in India, the house of Amar Chitra Katha has developed interactive quizzes for Alexa. The Chennai-based, online production house for children, ChuChu TV, is also committed on creating voice-first experiences for Alexa.
Read the story of how Alexa went to school
Over the last year, Alexa has picked up all the new nuances of being desi. She is now as desi as they come! Her efforts have not gone unnoticed. Indians have taken Alexa home with them so many times that if we were to stack all Echo devices sold in India, the stack would be FOUR TIMES taller than Mt Everest. You heard that right – if all that she does wasn’t enough, Alexa’s competing Mt Everest now. And dare we say, she’s winning too!
If Alexa, got desi then KIndle was not far behind. In keeping with the growing demand for regional books, Amazon now offers over 4,000 titles in five Indian languages (Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, and Tamil) on Amazon.in online increasing readership and enabling more customers to find books easily. And what's more, with the launch of Kindle Lite, the lightest reading app for Android users in India (it uses less than 2MB of smartphone memory) book libraries can easily travel wherever their users need to. Naturally, the response to the app has been overwhelming.
The best thing about Kindle Lite is that it offers all the Kindle features that customers have grown to love over the years, including personalised recommendations, seamless navigation and UI, Whispersync (syncing eBooks across devices), free eBook samples, and a vast library across English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, and Malayalam. In essence, Kindle Lite is designed for the amazing reading experience that Kindle offers, but on a low memory smartphone and in low network areas. It also allows users to start reading instantly, without having to wait for the full book to download. Kindle Lite App is available on Google Play Store along with the full Kindle for Android App.
Technology and Indian innovation has ensured amazing reading experiences to every smartphone in India!