E-commerce platform Flipkart has introduced an AI-based voice assistant in its grocery store, Supermarket, to make shopping easier for customers. The voice assistant will allow customers to discover and buy products using voice commands in English and Hindi. Flipkart also plans to add support for multiple languages in the future.
The voice-first conversational assistant 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, the company said in a statement.
“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,” said Jeyandran Venugopal, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Flipkart.
The voice assistant is capable of understanding vernacular languages such as Hindi, e-commerce categories, and products. It can also perform tasks such as searching for a product, recognizing product details, placing an order, and more. The assistant can also automatically detect the language spoken by the customer and can transcribe, translate, transliterate in real-time, and understands the user’s intent to have engaging shopping-related conversations in various Indian languages.
The AI-based voice assistant is currently available to all Hindi and English speaking customers using the Flipkart app on Android devices. The assistant will be made available gradually on the iOS devices and Flipkart website.
