New Delhi, Sep 18 (UNI) E-commerce giant Amazon on Wednesday announced the support of Hindi in its virtual assistant Alexa, allowing users to give voice commands in the country's major language.

The new version of the voice assistant can also manage Hindi, English and Hinglish -- a unique blend of Hindi and English.

Alexa lets customers to ask for music, get Bollywood news, cricket updates and more in Hindi and Hinglish on its Echo and other voice-controlled smart speakers.

"We are thrilled to bring a suite of AI advances in multi-lingual understanding so that customers can interact with Alexa in different regional variants of colloquial Hindi. We are grateful to Indian customers who contributed to Hindi development through the Cleo skill," Rohit Prasad, Vice President, and Head Scientist, Alexa AI, Amazon said.

Alexa arrived in India in 2017. Till date, it was able to understand and pronounce names of popular places, names, songs and more in languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Punjabi.

Soon, customers will also be able to speak to Alexa in Hindi and English without changing the language setting back and forth.

Thousands of developers have already started building Alexa's skills with a Hindi flavour.

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