[ad_1]
Amazon brings Alexa and Echo devices to Spain and Italy, several months after announcing support for Spanish and Italian for its digital voice assistant. You can now pre-order devices such as Echo, Echo Plus, Echo Dot, Echo Spot and Echo Sub in Italy and Spain. They begin shipping their goods next week, the company said.
It is likely that Amazon wants to wait for Alexa to support the languages of these countries before selling the devices there, as it has been the case in other international markets. In addition to language support, Echo devices in Italy and Spain also receive culture-specific updates to better reflect their countries. For example, by partnering with local brands, Amazon has made its Echo devices capable of offering local newspaper articles. and even regional recipes to try cooking at home.
Amazon has extended its deployment to other countries, making extensions more rare. France, for example, has just received the devices this summer. The slow pace may be due to the fact that it takes time to teach a voice assistant a new language. Currently, Alexa speaks and understands only English, Spanish, Italian, German and Japanese. Most of its growth has been in English-speaking countries.
In the race to learn more languages, Apple's Siri is leading the pack with support for 20 languages, while the Google Assistant speaks 16 and Microsoft's Cortana speaks more than seven. Google says that by the end of the year, his assistant will be able to support more than 30 languages.
In China, voice assistants are lagging behind, most companies like Baidu and Xiaomi can only speak and interpret Mandarin Chinese, not even other Chinese dialects, highlighting how difficult it can be to train an AI in several complex languages.
Source link
