Bengaluru: E-commerce giant Flipkart on Tuesday added a new voice assistance feature to its grocery ordering service Supermart. Customers can use this to buy products using voice commands in English, Hindi to start with.
“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.
Flipkart’s teams have also gone to various parts of the country and to fine-tune the voice capabilities for Indian languages. The AI platform built by Flipkart in-house has solutions for Speech Recognition, Natural Language Understanding, Machine Translation, and Text to Speech for Indian languages such as Hindi and other vernacular languages.
The AI can automatically detect the language spoken by the user, transcribe in real-time, translate, transliterate and understand the user’s intent in shopping-related activities, the company said. The AI can also understand mixed language commands, which would help users add items to their grocery cart similar to talking to a shopkeeper.
“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,” Manish Kumar, SVP Grocery and General Merchandise & Furniture, Flipkart, said.
