Amazon brings Alexa+ to India with Hindi and code-switching support

Amazon began rolling out Alexa+, its generative-AI overhaul of the Alexa voice assistant, to customers across India on Wednesday, adding Hindi and a code-mixed "Hinglish" mode to a product the company has spent more than a year building out market by market. The rollout, detailed in a post on Amazon's India newsroom, marks the first time Alexa+ has launched in a market where English is not the dominant home language, and it puts the assistant into direct contention with Google's newly relaunched Gemini for Home in the world's most populous country.

What is changing for Alexa users

Alexa+ is available immediately in Early Access to Amazon customers in India, the company said, with support for English, Hindi and Hinglish, the informal blend of the two languages common in everyday Indian speech. Amazon says the assistant can switch between the languages mid-sentence and no longer requires the wake word "Alexa" to be repeated before every follow-up request in a conversation. The company also says the assistant has been tuned to recognize Indian units and expressions, such as "dhai baje" for half past two, along with references to Bollywood, cricket and regional festivals.

Functionally, Alexa+ is meant to move beyond single-shot commands and questions toward completing multi-step tasks: managing a shopping list with remembered brand preferences, planning a meal with recipes, or controlling smart-home devices from partners including Atomberg, Qubo, Dreame and Wipro. Amazon says grocery ordering through its quick-commerce service, Amazon Now, and bookings through partners such as Swiggy, Zomato's District, MakeMyTrip, TripAdvisor and EazyDiner are coming to the assistant, though not all of those integrations are live at launch. The upgraded assistant currently works on the Echo Show 8, Echo Show 11, Echo Dot Max and Echo Studio, with access through the Alexa app, Fire TV and a browser at alexa.com described by Amazon as forthcoming, according to the company's own guide to the Echo Show lineup.

The pricing and the numbers behind the launch

Alexa+ is free to all customers during the Early Access period. Once that period ends, Amazon says the assistant will remain free for Prime members, while non-Prime customers and those on Prime Lite or Prime Shopping Edition plans will pay 2,000 rupees a month, or roughly $20.85, as a standalone subscription, a price point Business Standard reported matches the subscription's cost in other international markets. Amazon says its devices have handled roughly 9 billion voice interactions in India over the past 12 months, a figure the company is using to argue that the market is large enough to justify a dedicated language build rather than a stripped-down, English-only version of its newest assistant.

India is also, by most estimates, home to more than 600 million Hindi speakers, a number Amazon and outside reporting have both cited as the rationale for prioritizing the language ahead of most others outside the assistant's core English-speaking markets.

Eight years of Alexa in India, and a slower path for Alexa+

Amazon first brought Alexa to India in 2017 with English-only support and added Hindi voice commands in 2019, giving the company a long-running but comparatively basic presence in the market. Alexa+ itself, the generative-AI rebuild of the assistant, was announced in February 2025 and reached general availability for all customers in the United States in February 2026, before expanding through the year to the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Italy and Germany, according to TechCrunch's reporting on the India rollout. India is the first of those markets where Amazon built local-language capability into the product before a broader launch rather than after one.

That local-language work was visible months in advance. In June, Amazon began inviting a limited set of customers to test a Hindi-language beta of Alexa+, warning participants by email that the pre-release software would have bugs and might mispronounce local nuances or return inaccurate information, according to TechCrunch's earlier coverage of that test. Medianama's reporting on the same beta noted that Amazon was specifically targeting customers who mix Hindi and English in daily conversation, the code-switching behavior the company has now built into the shipped product.

Who is affected, and what Amazon is saying

The launch touches several groups beyond Alexa's existing customer base in India: the smart-home device makers whose products now route through the new assistant, the delivery and booking platforms Amazon is integrating with, and Amazon's device and cloud businesses, for which a larger installed base of Alexa+ subscribers in a market of more than a billion people could eventually become a meaningful subscription revenue line. Teena Sidana, Amazon's country manager for Alexa in India, framed the update as a shift in what the assistant is capable of rather than simply a language addition.

"This all-new Alexa is not just smarter, but genuinely capable of getting things done for customers in the real world," Sidana said in the company's announcement.

A crowded field, and what comes next

Amazon is not launching into an empty market. Google has spent 2026 rolling out Gemini for Home, which Google's own announcement describes as a replacement for Google Assistant across its speakers, displays and camera products, giving Amazon a well-funded rival pursuing the same shift from simple voice commands to conversational, task-completing assistants. India, with its scale and multilingual population, has become one of the more contested fronts in that competition, and Amazon's decision to build Hindi and Hinglish support before a wider international expansion suggests the company sees the market as a proving ground rather than an afterthought.

For now, the rollout remains in Early Access, with Amazon saying additional Indian languages, wider device support and the remaining local-service integrations will follow but declining to give a firm timeline for any of them. Whether the ₹2,000 monthly price holds up once free access ends, and how many of Amazon's Alexa users in India convert to paid Alexa+ subscriptions, will likely take months to become clear. Analysts and rival technology companies are expected to watch adoption in India closely as a signal of how generative-AI assistants perform outside English-language markets more broadly.