Amazon Launches Automated Messaging Assistant in Hindi to Ease Shopping

Amazon on Wednesday launched its Automated Messaging Assistant in Hindi for its customers. The new development is aimed to help customers visiting Amazon India by enabling a "seamless and friendly conversational experience". The company says that the Automated Messaging Assistant, which essentially works as a chat bot in the Customer Service section, is powered by its customer service-tuned artificial intelligence platform and uses machine learning and natural language processing capabilities to communicate with Hindi-speaking customers in the country. The launch is projected to break the language barrier for a large number of Indian customers.

"The conversation happens right inside the messaging window where the customer can naturally interact just as they would with a human and the bot seamlessly transitions to a human assistant within the same window, whenever necessary," Amazon said in the statement.

Initially, Amazon highlights that the Automated Assistant in Hindi is available on its Android app. The feature is designed to resolve queries of millions of customers shopping on the Amazon app with Hindi as their preferred language.

The Automated Messaging Assistant in Hindi is available on Amazon's Android app

"The new chat assistant in Hindi underlines our commitment to serve the next 100 million Indians to discover and shop with Amazon," said Akshay Prabhu, Director, Customer Service, Amazon India, in the statement. "We also see opportunities for scaling the messaging assistant as a contact channel —to increasingly resolving issues before a customer service associate is even involved."

To access the the Automated Messaging Assistant in Hindi on the Amazon Android app, users will first need to change their language preferences to Hindi. They can do this by pressing the hamburger menu icon, and then going to Language. After this, when users visit the Customer Service section, and the Contact Us option, the Automated Messaging Assistant in Hindi will then be visible.

This is notably not the first time when Amazon has attempted to please Hindi-speaking customers in India. Last year, the e-commerce giant brought Hindi language support to its Android app and mobile Web to help next 100 million users in the country. The company also recently introduced a Hindi user interface for the Amazon Prime Video subscribers in the country. Moreover, it announced Hindi support for Alexa last month and released a dedicated voice model to help build Hindi skills before the arrival of formal support.