Gadgets
Amazon Now Lets You Shop in Bengali, Marathi; Gets Hindi Voice Shopping
Expanding Indic-language support that received Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu last year, Amazon has brought Bengali and Marathi as the new regional languages for customers shopping through its e-commerce site. These languages are available alongside English and are aimed to attract and support new customers.
Kishore Thota, Director of Customer Experience and Marketing at Amazon India told Gadgets 360 that using the existing Indian language support, over five million customers shopped with Amazon in 2021 alone. He added that the languages the company had added so far are spoken and engaged by more than 80 percent of Indian households.
“Our primary objective is how to take the convenience of Amazon and everything it offers to every single Indian across the country, wherever they may be, whatever their capabilities may be, or preferences may be,” Thota said in an interview.
The executive further said that over 65 percent of Amazon orders and 85 percent of its new customers are from tier two or below geographics. Amazon is aiming to convert its regular visitors into buyers by enabling Indian language support.
“When customers actually visit us several times and in a different language, let’s say their default has been English, so they might visit us several times. But once they switch that language, their immediate nature of conversion increases, so they become buyers a lot faster after they switch their language. They also visit a lot more often, after they change their language to their language of preference,” said Thota.
Users can switch to any of the Indian languages by going to Country & Language settings from the Amazon app or its website.
Late last year, the demand to add the support for Marathi on Amazon was raised by Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), creating controversy. The Seattle, Washington-based company at that time had promised to bring support for the language “soon.”
Thota suggested that the controversy wasn’t the reason for the company to bring Marathi on board.
“We launched four major South Indian languages last year, and if we generally look at a roadmap of languages, probably Marathi and Bengali would have come next,” he said. “So, it was just a natural evolution of introducing new languages.”
Alongside new Indian languages for shopping online, Amazon is bringing Hindi support to its voice-based experience as an extension to the English part that it introduced in March last year. It will allow users to use their voice in Hindi to search for products or check their order status.
The experience will still be limited to Android users as Amazon sees Android domination on its customer base. However, Thota did say that an iOS version of the voice-based shopping experience was in the works and would soon be available.
Amazon is also working on bringing the experience in more Indian languages over time.
“It’s an investment we’re making to understand and learn from shopping in Hindi,” Thota said.
Amazon claimed that customers using voice shopping experience in English grew two times year-over-year. It, though, didn’t provide any details on number of consumers buying goods online using the advanced experience.
In March, Amazon rival Flipkart introduced voice search support in both Hindi and English languages on its platform. The Walmart-owned company also last year launched Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu in addition to English and Hindi to reach new customers in the country. We can certainly expect Flipkart to expand its language support with Bengali and Marathi in the coming days.
“At Xbox, we believe that with better tools, creators can make even more extraordinary games,” Haiyan Zhang, GM, Xbox Gaming AI, said in a blog post. “This partnership will bring together: Inworld’s expertise in working with generative AI models for character development, Microsoft’s cutting-edge cloud-based AI solutions including Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Research’s technical insights into the future of play, and Team Xbox’s strengths in revolutionizing accessible and responsible creator tools for all developers.”
The aforementioned AI design copilot is a toolset that will help game designers turn prompts into scripts and dialogue trees. In contrast, the character runtime will enable dynamically generated plot beats and quests. We’ve already seen heavy AI integration in games by way of procedural generation — a more recent example being the 1000+ planets in Starfield. Not to mention, enemy AI has been around for way longer.
Inworld made headlines in August when it launched a modded story mode for Grand Theft Auto V, Sentient Streets, in which players had to investigate the rise of a bizarre AI-worshipping cult — a segment loaded with characters that spoke in AI-generated dialogue, on the fly. The mod was later taken down by publisher Take-Two, leaving a permanent strike on the creator Bloc’s YouTube channel. As per The Verge, Inworld’s AI technology can also be used for narration in top-down RPGs to warn players about any events awaiting off-screen and respond to questions like we’ve seen in the past year with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bing Chat. Microsoft has also been heavily banking on artificial intelligence, having made a $10 billion (about Rs. 83,254 crore) investment in OpenAI. The company has also integrated AI tools into its popular suite of services and also added an AI copilot to Windows.
Despite being a Microsoft-affiliated AI toolset, it would be interesting to see whether titles using them will be allowed to thrive on other platforms. In July, Valve claimed that it would be cracking down on games that included AI-generated assets if the developer didn’t own the copyright to the piece of art. For the uninitiated, when you insert a prompt to create something in AI, the software simply repurposes existing assets found online and mushes them together — basically stealing from other artists and writers without appropriate commercial licenses. Infringing them would lead to the game not being distributed on Steam, forcing the developers to seek proper licenses for the asset by reaching out to the AI companies involved. It’s unclear how Microsoft’s partnership will play out — as long as AI content is being used as a catalyst to innovate and create something new, it should be fine.
In a post on X shared by BSNL’s Andhra Pradesh (@bsnl_ap_circle) unit, the company confirmed that BSNL users can upgrade their older 2G or 3G SIMs to a 4G SIM for free. Not only will the upgrade be free, but a promotional image shared with the post suggests that users who opt for the upgrade will also receive 4GB of free data that will be valid for three months. It is speculated that BSNL is aiming to boost its upcoming 4G services with this offer. The announcement was first spotted by Telecom Talk.
To access the free data offer and the free upgrade, BSNL users are requested to get in touch with executives at BSNL’s Customer Service Centre, franchisee or retailer stores, or contact one of their Direct Selling Agents (DSA). The promo image also adds in a finer print that the offer is available with certain terms and conditions, but hasn’t detailed any, so far.
Reliance’s Jio recently launched the 4G-supported Bharat B1 feature phone in India. The handset is priced at Rs. 1,299 in India. Alongside 4G connectivity, the phone comes with JioCinema and JioSaavn applications pre-installed.
The Jio Bharat B1 is equipped with the JioPay application, which is said to allow users to make UPI payments. Aiming to increase accessibility, the phone supports 23 languages overall, including multiple regional languages.
Realme, via Weibo, announced the arrival of the Realme GT 5 Pro in China. The display of the handset is confirmed to offer 3000 nits peak brightness. It has also been teased to offer heat dissipation with a surface area of around 10,000mm2. It is confirmed to ship with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC. The post doesn’t specify the exact launch date of the smartphone, however, given the release of the teasers, the launch could be just around the corner.
The Realme GT 5 Pro has been in the news a lot lately. It is expected to feature a 6.78-inch (1,264×2,780 pixels) AMOLED display and is tipped to come in 8GB, 12GB, and 16GB RAM options along with 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB inbuilt storage options.
For optics, the Realme GT 5 Pro is said to have a triple rear camera unit comprising two 50-megapixel sensors and an 8-megapixel shooter at the rear. The camera setup might include a Sony LYTIA LYT808 sensor, an OmniVision OV08D10 secondary sensor, and a Sony IMX890 telephoto sensor. For selfies, there could be a 32-megapixel sensor at the front. It is said to carry a 5,400mAh battery with support for 100W wired charging and 50W wireless charging.
The Realme GT 5 Pro is expected to come with upgrades over Realme GT 5. The latter was launched in China in August with a price tag of CNY 2,999 for the base model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
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