BENGALURU: You will soon be able to ask Amazon's voice-assistant Alexa to book an Uber or play your favourite music, and without switching to English. Amazon is preparing to introduce its Alexa Voice Service (AVS) along with its Echo speakers in India towards the end of this year, according to two people aware of the company's plans.The speakers will initially be launched with an English interface and be updated later to respond to commands in regional Indian languages including Marathi, Tamil and Hindi, these people said, declining to be identified.A multilingual interface is being developed at Amazon's Chennai facility, one of them said. Amazon did not reply to an email query from ET. Alexa on Echo, similar to Google Assistant on Home , will offer India's tech-savvy elites a unique technology combo that can sit in their homes or offices and execute their commands such as to buy groceries online or book a cab.For online purchases, Alexa will link to Amazon's online marketplace, the second-largest in India. More than that, Alexa will be crucial to Amazon's efforts to woo urban customers in India, specifically the top 1% who typically are members of its Prime subscription service that promises faster delivery and other benefits -although hurdles exist.Barriers such as two-factor authentication for payments and large family structures could complicate matters for Alexa in India."We will work around these barriers using pass-phrases and other India-specific innovations," said a senior executive at Amazon on condition of anonymity. "We expect Amazon to launch (Alexa and Echo) in the Indian market with very attractive pricing offers in the beginning, a similar strategy used with Amazon Prime Video and something that worked well," said an analyst. "These offerings are likely to be linked with existing users of Amazon's services in India, making it more appealing for them."Amazon has distributed its Echo speakers to select company executives, business professionals and analysts in India for testing."As of now, there is still a barrier to the extent of Alexa's capabilities because you cannot use it to purchase groceries from a local store or book yourself an Uber," said one of these business professionals who has been using the Echo device for about a month."However, when connected to your home WiFi you can get Alexa to draft and send work emails, text messages, help children with their homework ranging from mat hematics to history lessons, set up re minders, check food recipes, play music or a movie on Amazon Prime Video, and even do your shopping from Amazon," this person said.Once launched officially, Echo should allow users to book flight and movie tickets or hail a cab to work. In an interview to ET this month, Amazon India head, Amit Agarwal, indicated that the company was working on easing hurdles caused by language barriers."How will you help people who are not very well-versed with English? How will they shop? Indians are very well versed in buying but when they want service, they want to talk in the language they know," Agarwal said. The basic Echo Dot version costs $50 in the US, and the high-end version, $179.The Echo-branded speakers, launched in the US in 2015, account for 70.6% of the voice-enabled speaker market in that country, according to a report by eMarketer in May. Amazon introduced AVS and Echo in the UK and Germany in February."Alexa brings a fun and intuitive user-experience by allowing customers to control services using voice command... It will not be easy for competitors to copy it in a short time as it took Amazon years of R&D to deliver Alexa. Amazon, of course, will need to support local languages and get local businesses and developers to build skills on the Alexa platform," said Sandy Shen, research director at Gartner.