Flipkart launches Voice Assistant to help customers buy groceries
Flipkart's voice assistant responds to mixed language commands as wellThe voice-first conversational AI platform has been built by Flipkart’s in-house technology team
PremiumNEW DELHI : E-commerce major Flipkart today announced the launch of its new voice assistant that will be available on its grocery store Supermart to enable consumers buy products easily using voice commands in multiple languages, starting with Hindi and English.
“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 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 voice-first conversational AI platform 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 Walmart-owned company said in a statement.
These solutions are capable of understanding vernacular languages such as Hindi, e-commerce categories and products, and tasks such as searching for a product, understanding product details, placing an order, etc. The indigenously developed AI platform is built to automatically detect the language spoken by the user, and in real-time transcribe, translate, transliterate and understand the user’s intent to have engaging shopping-related conversations in various Indian languages.
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.
"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.
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