TL;DR
Amazon is beta-testing a Hindi version of Alexa+ in India, its first expansion into a non-Western-language market.
Amazon is testing Alexa+ in India with Hindi-language support, the company’s first move to bring its generative AI assistant to a non-Western-language market. The company sent emails to select Indian customers inviting them to join a beta-testing programme, according to TechCrunch, which viewed the invitations.
The emails asked users to fill out a form in Hindi by June 22 to join the programme. “We are creating a new Alexa experience, and your feedback will be important to refine what Alexa+ will be able to do,” the invitation read, adding that participants would be notified when the Hindi testing experience becomes available.
Amazon confirmed it is testing Alexa+ in India but declined to comment further. The beta software will have bugs and may give inaccurate information or mispronounce local nuances, according to the email. Alexa+ is not currently available in India, and no launch date has been announced.
The Hindi market is enormous. More than 600 million people speak the language in India, many of them in a code-mixed way that blends Hindi and English in the same conversation. Amazon first launched Alexa in India with English support in 2017 and added Hindi compatibility in September 2019, but the original Alexa was a command-based system with none of the conversational AI capabilities that define Alexa+.
Alexa+ is Amazon’s generative AI overhaul of its voice assistant, built on a mix of Amazon’s own models and third-party AI including technology from Anthropic. The company announced Alexa+ in February 2025 and made it available to all US users in February 2026. It costs roughly twenty dollars a month, though Prime members get it free, and it has since expanded to the UK, Canada, Mexico, Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria, and France.
India would mark a significant step beyond Western markets. The country presents particular challenges for voice AI, including dozens of regional languages, heavy code-switching between Hindi and English, and pronunciation patterns that differ sharply from the accents most AI models are trained on.
Amazon is not the only company chasing Indian voice users. Reliance’s Jio announced its Call Agent at its annual shareholder meeting last week, an AI assistant that can join phone calls, transcribe conversations, and perform tasks like booking cabs and ordering food. Jio said the service would support 22 Indian languages and reach its more than 500 million subscribers.
Meta, meanwhile, just invested $900 million in Indian fintech Cred and appointed its founder to run WhatsApp, signalling that India remains one of the most contested tech markets in the world. Amazon’s own $35 billion India commitment, focused largely on logistics and ecommerce, now extends to AI.
Whether Amazon can make Alexa+ work in Hindi well enough to compete with local alternatives remains the open question. The original Alexa never gained the kind of traction in India that it found in the US, and a beta test with bugs and mispronunciations is a long way from a polished product. But the fact that Amazon is investing in Hindi localisation at all suggests the company sees India as central to its AI assistant strategy, not an afterthought.
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