Flipkart has become the pioneer to blend conversational artificial intelligence that can recognise speech, understand natural language, translate machine, and text to speech for Indian languages. This technology is capable of understanding diverse Indian languages and take the customers through the app while explaining about the product features, usage, etc.
Walmart-owned Flipkart made a big announcement on Tuesday. It launched a voice assistant on its platform to assist people in their grocery shopping. Launched in the Flipkart’s grocery platform “Supermart,” it will help people in navigating through different products and place orders in multiple languages commencing with Hindi and English.
Flipkart has become the pioneer to blend conversational artificial intelligence that can recognise speech, understand natural language, translate machine, and text to speech for Indian languages. This technology is capable of understanding diverse Indian languages and take the customers through the app while explaining about the product features, usage, etc.
Invented by Flipkart’s in-house technology team, this solution can help thousands of customers who are not comfortable with the manual nature of eCommerce websites.
The new development is currently available to English and Hindi users possessing an android device and Flipkart’s app, however, it will be made available on iOS devices and the website soon.
Flipkart said it had undertaken a detailed ethnographic study for about five months in multiple towns and cities to gather insights and opportunities that led to the development of the voice assistant for groceries.
“The research brought forward interesting insights from users wanting to do a variety of tasks using voice while seeking easy accessibility of services. Therefore, Flipkart believes its Voice Assistant will elevate the user’s grocery shopping to more personal and natural experience,” it added.
“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 Chief Product and Technology Officer Jeyandran Venugopal said.
He further said that the technology team rigorously travelled throughout the country to gain a better understanding of the various contours of building a voice capability and fine-tune it to identify and respond to the different variations in Indian languages.
Believing that groceries have a huge growth potential in the future, Manish Kumar, SVP Grocery and General Merchandise & Furniture at Flipkart said, “Our grocery business has grown phenomenally over the last year, making this the right time for us to introduce the voice assistant capability,
