Online automobile marketplace Droom is working on introducing Indian languages on its platform, including Hindi, Telegu and Gujarati, by the next quarter as part of its efforts to expand user base on its platform.
"As part of our international expansion, we had identified Thailand as one of the markets and developed a Thai language platform. We realised there is tremendous potential to do that in the Indian market as well as started working around it. By Q1 2019, we should be availablde in Indian languages like Hindi, Kannada, Gujarati, Tamil and Telegu," Droom founder and CEO Sandeep Aggarwal told PTI.
He added that the company is working with its in-house team as well as external experts to make the language options available.
"It is not just using a translate feature, it is a challenging process. Languages have a lot of nuances and it needs to be understood how the customer will respond to terms like 'check pricing', 'check vehicle inspection' and others in regional languages," he explained.
Recently, e-commerce giant Amazon had launched its marketplace in Hindi to capitalise on the vast, untapped market of Hindi-speaking customers. Flipkart has also acquired a company called Liv.ai - an artificial intelligence-led speech recognition startup - as the Walmart-backed company looks to cater to the next wave of growth in Internet userbase that is coming from tier II cities and beyond.
Other online platforms are also expected to join the trend as industry reports suggest that the Hindi Internet user base is likely to outgrow the English userbase by 2021 and along with Marathi and Bengali users, will drive volume growth.
According to a report by Google, the number of Internet users in Indian languages is expected to reach 536 million over the next four years, contributing 35 per cent of USD 4.4 billion digital ad spend in the country. The share of local languages in current ad spend of USD 2 billion is only 5 per cent.
Disclaimer: No Business Standard Journalist was involved in creation of this content