Vodafone has tied up with WhatsApp to educate users on how to use local languages. The messaging app currently works in ten Indian languages. To inform regional language users of the local languages on WhatsApp, Vodafone has created customized webpages in various Indian languages (Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil among others). The pages have an animated step-by-step guide displaying how to activate the option of changing to different Indian languages while chatting. The telco will send its subscriber SMS messages with links to these webpages, where users will be able to download fonts in their regional language to use to chat on WhatsApp, a Vodafone spokesperson said. This arrangement is similar to Airtel OneTouch, which was at one point a service with a select few sites available for free, and had tutorial videos for subscribers on browsing different parts of the Internet. Difficulties in indic Rakesh Kapoor of Process 9, a firm that works on localizing apps, had said during our #NAMAindic discussion, that complete solutions for regional languages must be made mandatory: "All smartphones in this country should be 100% localized. Everything that comes bundled in a phone should, therefore, be available in all Indian languages. Telecom content must be available in local languages. Even in e-governance, there has to be a mandate that there can’t be a government site or app in this country which is not localized in all languages. Payments: there has to be a mandate that you can’t have a payment app in this country if it is not localized in Indian languages. If we…
