Flipkart Intoduces Voice Assistant To Assist Customers In Grocery Shopping

Walmart backed e-commerce major Flipkart on Tuesday today announced the launch of its new voice assistant, which will be capable to assist voice commands in multiple languages, starting with Hindi and English. This will be available on Flipkart’s grocery store Supermart and will enable consumers to buy and discover products easily. 

The first voice conversational AI platform has been built by an in-house technology team with solutions for speech recognition, language understanding, machine translation, and text-to-speech for Indian languages. These solutions are capable of understanding vernacular languages like Hindi, e-commerce categories and products, and tasks like checking out a product, understanding product details, placing an order, etc. 

"As a homegrown e-commerce company, Flipkart has been at the forefront of building India-first innovations and Video, Vernacular and Voice have been the key pillars of solving for the adoption of e-commerce in India. While we have seen great adoption for our video and vernacular offerings, the next step in that direction is to solve for the voice capability for e-commerce," Flipkart's Chief Product and Technology Officer Jeyandran Venugopal said.

The technology team at Flipkart is said to have travelled across the country and conduct a 5 month detailed ethnographic study to understand the various contours of building a voice capability and fine-tuned it to spot and answer the various variations in Indian languages.

The Voice Assistant for grocery is currently available to all or any English and Hindi users using Flipkart's mobile app on android devices. The development will also be gradually made available on iOS and the website.

The developed AI platform is made to automatically detect the language spoken by the user, and in real-time transcribe, translate, transliterate and understand the user’s intent to possess engaging shopping-related conversations in various Indian languages, the company said.

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, Flipkart added.

Commenting on the development of the voice assistant," Manish Kumar, SVP Grocery and General Merchandise & Furniture, Flipkart, said, "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.”