Flipkart an ecommerce marketplace in India has recently introduced Voice Assistant capabilities on its platform which will improve overall user experience by offering a simpler and more natural way to shop. The voice assistant will initially allow consumers to make purchases in Hindi and English before later introducing other languages.
The AI voice assistant platform has been built by Flipkart’s in-house technology team with solutions for Speech Recognition, Natural Language Understanding, Machine Translation, and Text to Speech for Indian languages. These solutions are capable of understanding vernacular languages such as Hindi, ecommerce categories and products, and tasks such as searching for a product, understanding product details, placing an order and more.
“The technology team at Flipkart traveled across the country to understand the various contours of building a voice capability and fine-tuned it to identify and respond to the different variations in Indian languages. The launch of Voice Assistant also aligns well with the growing adoption and comfort of consumers towards voice-based online commerce.”
– Jeyandran Venugopal, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Flipkart
Detailed research conducted by Flipkart gave the company a good idea of what users were expecting from the assistant and which tasks were most important to the experience of a consumer. Flipkart believes its Voice Assistant will elevate the user’s grocery shopping to a more personal and natural experience.
“Voice-led shopping is natural and we wanted to give our users a truly conversational experience, in the most natural way possible. Our indigenously developed and AI-enabled Voice Assistant, which is first introduced for grocery, will make shopping simpler for consumers by assisting them in an easy basket building experience. Grocery is one of the most underpenetrated categories in Indian e-commerce and has a huge potential to grow and solve for customer adoption. Our grocery business has grown phenomenally over the last year, making this the right time for us to introduce the Voice Assistant capability. ”
– Manish Kumar, SVP Grocery and General Merchandise & Furniture, Flipkart
