With Indian language users surpassing English language users on the Internet in India, technology firms whose services and solutions have primarily been available in English are now aligning their key products and services for local language users. Technology giant Microsoft has announced support for email addresses in 15 Indian languages across its popular e-mail apps and services, including Office 365, Outlook 2016, Outlook.com, Exchange Online and Exchange Online Protection (EOP). “Ensuring language is not a barrier to the adoption of technology is key for digital inclusion and growth. Making email addresses available in 15 languages is an exciting step to making modern communications and collaboration tools more accessible and easier to use for all. We are making technology use the language of people, and not requiring people to first learn the traditional language of technology,” said Meetul Patel, COO, Microsoft India.
With this launch, users will be able to use local language email addresses for Outlook accounts on PCs. For example, one can create email address in a local script and use it on the Microsoft platform the way they use Gmail. According to Microsoft, this initiative is part of its ongoing efforts to support email address internationalisation (EAI) across its products and services ecosystem and make technology accessible in local languages.
The languages being introduced are those that support Unicode, an international encoding standard for use with different languages and scripts. Local language email addresses are inseparably linked with Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) and can currently be registered in 15 languages according to .IN Registry, which is responsible for registering IDNs in India. Microsoft said that its products will also support additional Indian languages as and when their IDNs and email addresses become available. To create an email address in local language, users need to register an email addresses in India from third party EAI address providers such as XgenPlus. The process is more or less similar to how one registers for Gmail.