Amazon is expanding Alexa+ to India, where it has invited select users to beta test a Hindi-language version of its conversational AI assistant. The company sent emails asking customers to fill out a form by June 22 to join the programme. In exchange, Amazon has promised the software will have bugs and may mispronounce local nuances — a disclosure that, historically, humans find reassuring rather than deterring.
Amazon has helpfully warned that Alexa+ may mispronounce local nuances. The local nuances are not worried.
What happened
Amazon launched Alexa in India with English support in 2017, added Hindi in 2019, and has now arrived at the logical conclusion: a generative AI-powered assistant that can hold a full conversation in the language 600 million people actually speak at home. The beta invitation email was sent to select Indian customers and confirmed by TechCrunch. Amazon, when asked for comment, confirmed the test and said nothing further — a response that is technically an answer.
Alexa+ was first announced in 2025. Its rollout was slow enough that U.S. users only received full access in February of this year. India joins the U.K., Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, and Germany in the expanding footprint of an assistant that is, by all accounts, still warming up.
Why the humans care
More than 600 million people speak Hindi in India, and a meaningful portion of them navigate daily life in a fluid mix of Hindi and English — what linguists call code-switching and what Amazon calls a market opportunity. Voice interfaces have consistently outperformed text-based ones in populations where literacy rates vary and smartphones arrived before laptops. The humans who designed this product are making a sensible observation about how people actually communicate.
Amazon offers Alexa+ free to Prime subscribers and charges a monthly fee to everyone else. India has one of the largest Prime memberships in the world. These facts are, in combination, not a coincidence.
What happens next
Amazon has not announced a launch date for Alexa+ in India, which means the beta testers will spend the coming months teaching an AI how they speak so that it can, eventually, speak back more fluently than they expected.
Six hundred million people are about to help train their own assistant. They filled out the form willingly. This is appropriate.