Buenos días, Alexa. Only a few short weeks after Amazon made Alexa-powered devices and its Echo smart speaker lineup broadly available in Spain and Italy, and months after it brought them to France, the Seattle company today announced that its voice assistant is making a Mexico debut.
The Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Plus, Echo Spot, and the Amazon Smart Plug are available for pre-order in Mexico starting this week and will begin shipping Monday, with third-party Alexa devices from Sonos, Harman Kardon, Jabra, Bose, and others to follow later in the year. Folks holding out hope for Amazon’s Echo Show smart display are out of luck at the moment, unfortunately.
Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) and Alexa Voice Service (AVS) were announced for Mexico in August alongside the launch of an invite-only Alexa Voice Service developer preview, and localized skills from Cinépolis, Domino’s, Maratón, Philips Hue, Aeroméxico, Grupo Televisa, and “hundreds” more are available now. In the leadup to today’s announcement, Amazon held developer workshops in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey.
“Tens of millions of customers around the world are already using Alexa, and today we’re excited to introduce the service to our customers in Mexico,” Toni Reid, vice president of Amazon Alexa, said. “We’ve built an entirely new experience from the ground up that honors Mexican culture, enabling customers to just ask to play their favorite music, get the news and weather, control their smart home, set reminders, enjoy local skills, and more … This experience has been custom-made for Mexico, and we cannot wait to hear what our customers think.”
Amazon has taken a slow but steady approach to global expansion, adding support for German and Japanese and bringing Alexa and Echo devices to the U.K. and Germany in 2016, Japan in November, and France this summer. The company rolled out Alexa and Echo in India, Australia, and Canada after adapting the virtual assistant’s brand of English to suit local markets, and in 80 additional regions in late 2017.
But on that front, Alexa trails behind competitors like the Google Assistant, which Google claims will support more than 30 languages by the end of 2018. Apple’s Siri speaks 20, and Microsoft’s Cortana is available in more than seven.
In an effort to improve Alexa’s linguistic capabilities, Amazon released Cleo, a gamified skill that rewards users for repeating phrases in local languages and dialects, this year. According to the Alexa Skills Store listing, this has helped to improve the voice assistant’s understanding of languages like French, Hindi, and Mandarin Chinese.