BENGALURU: Amazon and Google are both rushing to navigate a new frontier in India — the country’s many local languages and dialects that likely hold the key to their overall growth here.The technology giants are working on understanding how Indians speak, as they push their artificial intelligence-powered voice assistants, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, deeper in the market. It is challenging enough getting Alexa and Assistant to understand Indian English. The bigger task is to get the voice assistants to decipher India’s many local languages as well as sundry combinations of local languages and Indian English.Even better for the companies if Alexa and Assistant can talk Indian (English) too.“Among all the countries we have launched Alexa in, India has been one of the most technically challenging,” said Rohit Prasad, head scientist, Alexa AI, Amazon. Indians tend to “interact (with Alexa) in many different languages and mix multiple languages within the same utterance.”So Amazon’s voice assistant — mostly used on its Echo smart speakers — needs to be able to decode and respond to commands such as ‘Alexa, time kya hai?’ or ‘AR Rahman songs bajao.’ Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant dominate India’s nascent market for voice assistants, touted to be the next big interface in computing.The number of Internet users in Indian languages is expected to reach 536 million by 2021, accounting for nearly 75% of the country’s internet user base, according to a KPMG-Google study last year.At Amazon’s Alexa research unit in Bengaluru, a small team of speech-recognition scientists is working on solving the local language problem. Substantial progress has been made, and the voice assistant can now understand Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Punjabi phrases. The target is for Alexa to be able to understand commands as well as speak entirely in these languages.Amazon recently extended to India a new Alexa ‘Skill’, its version of a voice app, called Cleo that lets customers teach Alexa utterances in several Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, and Gujarati.“It is not just about (gaining) a cultural understanding of the market and entities that are very local to the country, but also linguistic nuances because the semantics are completely different. For instance, in India, we say ‘how many marks did you get?’ In the US, they say scores or grades (and not marks),” said Prasad, who has led the technology side of Amazon’s voice assistant since its inception in 2014. “We want to focus on (delivering) an Alexa experience that will think Indian, speak Indian, and understand Indian.”As for Google, the internet giant is focused on capitalising on its growing base of voice search users on Android smartphones in India.“Voice has been emerging as the preferred mode of use for new internet users. We are seeing a 270% year-on-year growth in voice searches in India,” said Rajan Anandan, vice president, India and Southeast Asia, Google, during the company’s annual ‘Google for India’ event on Tuesday.