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Amazon and Google are planning to spend about Rs 60 crore on advertisements of their smart speakers such as Echo and Home series over the next one year, reported Mint.
“Both Google and Amazon have deep pockets. They will spend disproportionately to create the voice assistant category, which is still nascent in India. Its early adopters will be young users who already use voice assistants on phones. They are more likely to buy the speakers that will be adopted by others in a household,” Navin Khemka, managing partner, Wavemaker India, a GroupM-owned media agency, told the paper.
Google has already been promoting a culture to use voice assistants among Android users through ‘Make Google Do It’ campaign. The campaign ads, promoting Google assistance, show young users asking for directions, playing music and texting by speaking to their phones.
Google believes the increasing use of voice assistant on phones directs to users' interest to indulge in such technologies. “We have been seeing an increase in number of people using Google Assistant on phones,” a Google India spokesperson told the paper, adding that smart speakers represent a new computing paradigm, one that is very nascent.
"We believe there is definite user interest to interact more seamlessly and conveniently with technology, where voice is a key part of the new experience,” the spokesperson added.
Google is still working on Home's multimedia campaign. The firm has promised to launch Hindi language support to widen its user base. A print campaign for the same has already been launched in the leading dailies.
Amazon is promoting its virtual personal assistant (VPA) through an ad featuring a family that uses the Echo smart speaker to get news and weather updates, play music, make a shopping list and even play games. The ecommerce firm is promoting Echo even at the ongoing Indian Premier League (IPL).
“The team’s focus was to highlight Echo as a family device with varied uses relevant to each and every member of the family. Our target groups for Echo devices are families that are technology-friendly and willing to spend for convenience,” Ravi Desai, director, mass and brand marketing at Amazon India, told the paper.
Amazon claims to have developed Alexa for Indian customers as the voice assistant is accustomed to local accent, knowledge, services and features.
“We have expanded her natural language understanding to fully comprehend context and intent, even if the sentences include Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam or Punjabi proper nouns. You can ask Alexa to add ‘atta’ to your shopping list. She knows Rajinikanth jokes, follows cricket and is aware that the term ‘bunk’ is about skipping class and has nothing to do with bed varieties,” Desai explained.
While we may have to wait to see how Indian customers adopt the VPA-enabled wireless speakers, a research firm Gartner Inc suggests that these speakers will generate USD 3.52 billion in global revenue by 2021, up from USD 0.72 billion in 2016.
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