In order to make consumers’ eCommerce journey simpler and more natural, Flipkart has finally launched Voice Assistant capability on its platform. Introduced in Flipkart’s grocery store, supermart, the Voice Assistant will enable consumers to discover and buy products easily using voice commands in multiple languages, starting with Hindi and English. The Voice Assistant, which aims at providing natural grocery shopping experience, is currently available to Flipkart’s mobile app on Android devices and will be gradually made available on iOS and the website.
Stating that Video, Vernacular and Voice have been the key pillars of solving for the adoption of e-commerce in India. Jeyandran Venugopal, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Flipkart, said, “The launch of Voice Assistant aligns well with the growing adoption and comfort of consumers towards voice-based online commerce.”
The voice-first conversational AI 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, e-commerce categories and products, and tasks such as searching for a product, understanding product details, placing an order, etc.
Asserting that grocery is one of the most underpenetrated categories in Indian eCommerce and has a huge potential to grow and solve for customer adoption, Manish Kumar, SVP Grocery and General Merchandise & Furniture, Flipkart, said, “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. Our grocery business has grown phenomenally over the last year, making this the right time for us to introduce the Voice Assistant capability. ”
According to Flipkart, This AI platform is built to automatically detect the language spoken by the user, and in real-time transcribe, translate, transliterate and understand the user’s intent to have engaging shopping-related conversations in various Indian languages. With its ability to understand variations in commands in both English and Hindi while also responding to mixed language commands, the Voice Assistant will help consumers build their grocery basket by simply talking to the assistant, similar to talking to a shopkeeper, added Flipkart.
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