Audible Eyes India Expansion with More Local Languages

Amazon’s Audible, an online audiobook and podcast platform, is working on adding more Indian languages to its ‘Suno’ service that offers audio stories and podcasts, as the company looks to further strengthen its position in India. Having entered India in 2018, Audible has a range of audio books and currently has over two lakh titles available in the country.

Suno, which is India-first app, offers over 100 audio stories and podcasts for free in English and Hindi. “Suno is available in just Hindi and English so far, and we have purposefully focused on those two languages because we do not see too much value in doing anything that’s half-baked and do not work to spread our efforts too thin. No doubt we are working on expanding Suno to other Indian languages. I think that would take our audience expansion to other states as well,” Shailesh Salani, Country Head (India), Audible told PTI.

Though Shailesh did not commit on the timeline for new languages to be added, he said that the company is “working on spinning up something that is comprehensive enough for a start and continues to build from there”. He adds, “I think all the buzz is around regional languages. A lot of the consumers have come online recently and there is a dearth of (regional) content (the kind that we offer). So we obviously have our eyes on that”.

Suno, which is India-first app, offers over 100 audio stories and podcasts for free in English and Hindi

Talking about the Indian market, Shailesh said that the country is among the fastest growing regions for the company. “The market is young (for us), but I think from a relative sense, it has been one of our fastest growing countries globally,” he said. Adding further, he quoted that a big focus area for the company is India is to enhance awareness about the service.

“In terms of growth, awareness is going to continue to be a big focus for us. We work collaboratively (for content) and being part of the Amazon family drives a lot of the discovery and growth. We are doing a lot of India-first things and we’ll continue to do that in 2021 as well,” Shailesh added.