Snapchat rolls out support for 5 more Indian languages

Snapchat had added support for Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Punjabi last year. It has now added five more languages to its app.

Snapchat makes its app more India-centric. (Shutterstock)

Snap, the parent company of photo-sharing app Snapchat, on Thursday rolled out support for five additional Indian languages Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu.

Snapchat currently supports Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Punjabi, which were introduced last year, bringing the total to nine, the company said in a statement.

"We continue to roll out new features and experiences that reflect the culture and values of our community in India. We are excited by the growth we've seen here as we have almost doubled our daily users over the past year," said Nana Murugesan, Managing Director, International Markets at Snap Inc.

Snapchat which has an average of 218 million daily users is trying to build a local product for India where Facebook-owned Instagram is very popular.

The company opened its first office in Mumbai last year and established a team focused on expanding local partnerships, building an engaged community of creators and users and supporting local advertisers.

The company has so far announced partnerships with TSeries, NDTV and WWM Times Group. In addition, it launched 'Landmarkers' an "Augmented Reality (AR) experiences - for the Taj Mahal and the Gateway of India, as well as AR Lenses, Filters and Stickers during Indian festivals.

Snap recently teamed up with Reliance Jio for a first of its kind "Jio's Got Talent" creative AR challenge.

"India is one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world, and we want our platform to be accessible to as many people as possible," said Murugesan.

The average number of Snaps created every day has grown to more than 3.5 billion while the average time spent per user is 30 minutes per day.

On average, 2 in 5 Snapchatters watch Discover feed content every day that offers more than 450 premium content channels worldwide.

Snapchat recently launched a unique form of personalised entertainment with Bitmoji TV, featuring the Snapchatter and last snapped friend in a 10-episode series.