Times of News: Tier-II and Tier-III markets: Tech companies using local languages to capture growing demand

Thursday, 31 August 2017

Tier-II and Tier-III markets: Tech companies using local languages to capture growing demand

Apart from GoDaddy, internet giant Google has also recognised the demand for its services in local languages.

The Kapil Sharma Show to go off air, The Drama Company to take its spot

Shubh Mangal Saavdhan movie review: This Ayushmann Khurrana and Bhumi Pednekar film suffers from a sit-com flatness

As ISRO launch fails, glitch in space waits for fix

With substantial growth in internet infrastructure on the one hand, and lowering of data costs on the other, technology companies, both global and domestic, have managed to expand their reach on the Indian market. With Tier-II and Tier-III markets and towns seeing a higher potential for growth than metros, these companies are now focusing on addressing one of the most essential drivers of technology adoption in these segments — local language capabilities.

“Our care centres, which is a big part of our strategy used to handle about 300 calls per day when we started five years ago, that has gone up to 4,000 conversations every day. Our care centres address four languages today — Hindi, English, Tamil and Marathi — that cover 60 per cent of India. After we launched our product in these four languages in November 2016, the number of call volumes went up 40 per cent from non-Tier-I areas, and that was an indication to us about the demand,” Nikhil Arora, vice-president and managing director of Indian operations at web-hosting and cloud platform GoDaddy told The Indian Express in an interview. He said that the care centres addressed to the needs of GoDaddy’s existing and potential customers by helping them with technology adoption.

Apart from GoDaddy, internet giant Google has also recognised the demand for its services in local languages. In August, the company added voice search capability for eight additional Indian languages such as Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Telugu, Urdu, Bengali, Malayalam and Tamil to help users search for content online by simply speaking into their Android phones. Its voice search feature is available in English and Hindi in India.

While launching the additional languages on voice search, Google’s Technical Program Manager Daan van Esch told reporters through a video conference that Google had been working with native speakers to collect speech samples, and has deployed machine learning models were trained to understand the various sounds and words, thus translating words from sound to text in the process. “Voice input for each of these languages

is expected to get better over time, as more and more native speakers use the product,” he had said.

Earlier this year as well, Google had announced the launch of new products and features to help create more language content and address the needs of new users coming online. The tech giant has been ramping up local language support for a variety of its products citing more users of Indic languages starting to use these products.

A report released by Google and KPMG estimated that 536 million Indian consumers are expected to use regional languages for online services by 2021, compared with about 199 million users who are expected to access the web in English.

“Indian language internet users are expected to account for nearly 75 per cent of India’s internet user base by 2021. Growth in user base will be complemented by the increasing penetration of internet enabled devices, availability of affordable high speed internet, India’s rising digital literacy and Indian language enablement of the ecosystem bringing and engaging more Indian language users online,” the Google-KPMG report released in April said.

The report further highlighted that apart from Hindi, users of languages such as Marathi and Bengali are expected to drive volume growth, while Tamil, Kannada and Telugu users are expected to be among the most digitally engaged through 2016 to 2021. The report also noted that the higher propensity of Indian language users to respond to a digital advertisement in their local language is also expected to increase the share of local language advertisements in the digital medium.

Nikhil Arora also pointed out that some of GoDaddy has had advertising campaigns in as many as six languages. “The biggest difference between global markets and India is that there’s uniformity and consistency in global markets, but in India each state has its own nuances in terms of how people are wanting to go digital… Majority of Tier-II,

Tier-III customers need that local language connect to understand and be able to call our customer care,” he said.

Recognising demand

* Google has also added voice search capability for eight additional Indian languages such as Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Telugu, Urdu, Bengali, Malayalam and Tamil to help users search for content online by simply speaking into their Android phones

* GoDaddy’s care centres used to handle about 300 calls per day when we started five years ago, that has gone up to 4,000 conversations every day

For all the latest Technology News, download Indian Express App