Indian users discover Alexa's singing talent — make her sing 15 hours a day

• Amazon Alexa, on average, spends 15 hours a day singing songs to Indian users across all its devices in the country.
• Of those 15 hours, at least one hour a day is spent singing 'Happy Birthday'.
• While use of smart speakers in growing worldwide, penetration in India market is around 20.9%, outperforming penetration in other countries.

Amazon Alexa has been in India for little over a year now and despite the increasing abundance of music apps like Spotify, JioSaavn, Gaana and YouTube in the country, Indian users of Echo devices want to hear Alexa sing.

According to Amazon India, the virtual assistant spends 15 hours a day, on average across all devices, singing songs in her own voice — not through music apps. “What can be more natural to a customer to interact with technology than voice,” Dilip RS, the country manager of Alexa Skills at Amazon, told Business Insider India.

Of those 15 hours, at least one hour a day is spent singing ‘Happy Birthday’ for Indian users.

While Amazon has not specified 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 over four times taller than Mount Everest.

One of the determining factors is that Alexa isn’t just available through Echo devices but through TV, mobile phones, the FireTV stick,and third-party speakers like 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,” Dilip explains.

Even skills on Alexa, like singing songs, have grown by from 10,000 to 20,000 skills in the one 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 use of smart speakers in growing worldwide, penetration in India market is around 20.9%, outperforming penetration in other countries around the world according to an IHS Markit report. And, as per Accenture, one of the reasons for this is a 97% satisfaction rate among Indian consumers.

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