Walmart-owned ecommerce giant Flipkart has introduced a voice assistant for grocery shopping in India. The AI assistant will be available only in the app’s grocery sub-section, Supermart, with support for English and Hindi.
The company said its development team collected samples from across the country to understand pronunciations and variations in different languages. Flipkart is rolling out the feature for its Android app’s users starting today, with an iOS update coming later.
Through this feature, you can search for products, understand product details, add them to cart, and place an order. Flipkart claims that the AI assistant is conversational, so you’ll feel like you’re talking to your neighborhood shopkeeper.
Jeyandran Venugopal, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Flipkart said this feature is the next step in the direction to solve vernacular challenges in ecommerce:
As a homegrown ecommerce 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 ecommerce 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 ecommerce.
In March, Flipkart’s rival Amazon added voice shopping experience in its app through Alexa in India. However, Amazon’s voice service is only available in English.
Last year, Google said that voice searches grew in India by 270% year-on-year. That’s an encouraging figure for companies to introduce more voice-based features in their apps.
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