Finding difficult to buy your daily grocery products online? Well, Flipkart is here to help you. India’s homegrown e-commerce marketplace has added natural voice assistant capability to its grocery store, the Supermart. You could now speak out to the voice assistant to find, discover and buy products directly from the store. Right now, the voice assistant supports Hindi and English languages, with more Indian languages support coming in the future.
The conversational AI-powered voice assistant can detect and understand vernacular languages such as Hindi. It can also understand normal grocery categories and products as you speak. It can do tasks such as the search for a product, understand product details, place an order on Supermart etc. For this, the Flipkart’s in-house technology team undertook a detailed ethnographic study for over five months in multiple towns and cities. Based on this research and insights, the team developed the Voice Assistant, especially for grocery.
The voice assistant can automatically detect the language when a user speaks to it. Then in real-time, it can transcribe, translate, transliterate and understand what the user’s intent. These possibilities are derived from solution for Speech Recognition, Natural Language Understanding, Machine Translation, and Text to Speech for Indian languages.
You could talk to a voice assistant to build your grocery basket, similar to the way you talk to a shopkeeper in a Kirana store.
“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. The technology team at Flipkart travelled across the country to understand the various contours of building a voice capability and fine-tuned it to identify and respond to the different variations in Indian languages. The launch of Voice Assistant also aligns well with the growing adoption and comfort of consumers towards voice-based online commerce,” commented Jeyandran Venugopal, Chief Product and Technology Officer in a press release.
Currently, the voice assistant for grocery is available on Flipkart Supermart section on its Android mobile app. The team plans to gradually roll out the feature on iOS mobile App, it’s PWA mobile site and website.