Hike messenger, India’s first home-grown and fastest growing messaging platform, will pave the way to get India online with the launch of its app in eight vernacular languages namely Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Bengali, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu.
This launch means that people and communities across India can now be in touch with their family, friends and contacts in their own native languages, defying the English language barrier, erstwhile felt in messaging apps. This launch, available immediately on Android phones with the following features:
Multi-lingual interface From the moment you open the app, you can choose the language of your app. Thus your full app experience is in your native language!
Multi-lingual keyboard It allows you to type in up to 9 languages [including English]. It also offers glide functionality at the bottom of the chat panel that lets you swap between the languages with ease, thus upping the fun in chatting. For a bi-lingual or multi-lingual chat experience, this is a wonderful addition.
- The keyboard comes packed with predictive text technology that works on artificial intelligence and gives you a wide array of relevant words in your native language as you type, thus helping you save time and express better.
- One expresses one’s emotions best in one’s native language. Hike’s immensely addictive stickers are also available in all these languages and help you express yourself in your native language.
Commenting on the launch, Kavin Bharti Mittal, CEO & Founder, Hike messenger said
We’re excited to launch hike in 8 local languages. For the first time ever millions of Indians will be able to seamlessly chat in their local languages only on hike. Every single hiker will now be able to choose a local language and also with it, see a special keyboard that they can use built specifically for that language. One cannot build for India without understanding the enormous diversity in the country. This is another big step towards catering to that diversity to bring India online.
Check Hike Localization in action below:
Hike’s Growth Story
- Dec 2012 – Global launch
- Feb 2013 – Messaging traffic grows 10X week on week
- April 2013 – Hit the first 5M user milestone in just 4 months of its launch | Raised $7M from BSB
- Feb 2014 – Hit the 15M user mark
- April 2014 – Received $14M fresh funding from BSB
- June 2014 – Crossed 20M user mark, launched first TVC
- July 2014 – Hit #1 rank on App stores
- August 2014 – Crossed 35M user mark, receives $65M fresh funding led by Tiger Global & BSB
- November 2014 – Launches regional stickers on hike
- January 2015 – Launched free Hike Calls
- February 2015 – Launched Cricket Scores on hike
- Aug 2015: Hike announces 20 billion messages per month and launched Hike News
- Sep 2015: Launched Group Calling with upto 100 people
Additional information
You can download the app at – http://get.hike.in For more information, please visit the Hike Blog
[Image Credit* – Wikimedia]