Tech giant Amazon today announced the availability of Echo Dot, Echo, and Echo Plus to all Indian consumers. Priced at Rs 4,499, Rs 9,999, and Rs 14,999, respectively, all three devices are available for purchase at over 350 retail outlets such as Croma, Reliance, Vijay Sales, Crossword, and also on Amazon.in.
Echo devices are voice-controlled speakers designed entirely around your voice – powered by Amazon’s AI-based voice assistant Alexa. Just ask, and Alexa will answer questions, play music, turn the lights on and off, give sports scores, check the weather, call your friends and family and more.
Echo users also now stay in close contact with each other using the Alexa-to-Alexa calling and messaging feature. To make and receive calls using Alexa, users need to have supported Echo devices or the free Alexa app on their Android or iOS mobile phones. In addition, users can set up routines for Alexa to perform a series of actions from a single voice command, shop on Amazon.in using their voice, and choose from over 12,000 Alexa skills to enhance their Echo experience.
“We are excited to make Alexa and our Echo devices available for all customers, and we can’t wait to hear about their experiences. Since Alexa runs in the cloud, she is always getting smarter – the Alexa experience in India continues to evolve with new features, even better speech recognition, new localised skills, expanded music selection, and more,” said Jayshree Gururaj, Director, Amazon Devices.
In January this year, Amazon announced that Alexa now has over 12,000 skills for Indian users. In less than 60 days of the Alexa India skill store going live, Amazon has added more than 1,000 new skills to the store.
Amazon Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) is a collection of self-service APIs, tools, documentation and code samples, enabling developers around the world to build voice experiences for Alexa customers in India. At launch, Indian users could enjoy close to 11,000 skills offered by global and Indian developers such as Ted Talks, Saavn, ESPNcricinfo, Ola, Tarla Dalal, Zomato, Freshmenu, Goibibo, and Housejoy among others.
To find a skill and enable, go to the skills section in the Alexa app browse for skills and then click enable. If you know the skill name, then you can just ask Alexa to enable the skill. To enable Ola, just say “Alexa, enable Ola.” The Alexa companion app can be downloaded from Google Play and Apple App Store.
Amazon Echo devices and the Alexa skills store made their debut in India on October 31, 2017.
