Indian users make Alexa sing for 15 hours a day

Amazon Alexa has been in India for more than a year and, despite the increasing abundance of music applications such as Spotify, JioSaavn, Gaana and YouTube in the country, Indian users of Echo devices want to hear Alexa sing.

As per Amazon India, the virtual assistant spends 15 hours a day, on average, on all devices, singing songs in her own voice, not via music applications. "What can be more natural to a customer to interact with technology than voice," said Dilip RS, the country manager of Alexa Skills at Amazon.

Out of those 15 hours, at least one hour a day is dedicated to singing "Happy Birthday" for users in India.

While Amazon has not mentioned in particular how many Alexa-enabled devices have been sold in India, they claim that the total number of devices sold, if stacked one on top of the other, would be four times higher than the Mount Everest.

One of the determining factors is that Alexa is not only available through Echo devices, but through television, mobile phones, the FireTV stick and third-party speakers such as Bose and BoAt. " It's not just about the echo set of devices. We work with a lot of third-party devices to make sure that Echo is available everywhere," explains Dilip.

Even Alexa skills, such as singing songs, have increased from 10,000 to 20,000 skills in the year that the virtual assistant has been in India Dilip adds: " India has one of the largest developer markets in the world — four million developers. So we do a lot of activities for them."

While the use of intelligent speakers is growing around the world, India's market penetration is around 20.9%, surpassing penetration in other countries around the world says the IHS Markit report. And, according to Accenture, one of the reasons for this is a 97% satisfaction rate among Indian customers.