Flipkart, India’s homegrown e-commerce marketplace, launched Voice Assistant capability aimed at improving consumers’ eCommerce journey. The Voice Assitant enables consumers to discover and buy products using voice commands in Indian languages and English.
Although the new feature is currently available only on its Android app, Flipkart said the iOS and website enablement is in progress.
The India-based eCommerce marketplace said the launch marks a decade of innovations at Flipkart.
In a press release, the Walmart-owned company said “the voice-first conversational AI platform has been built by Flipkart’s inhouse technology team with solutions for Speech Recognition, Natural Language Understanding, Machine Translation, and Text to Speech for Indian languages.
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These solutions are capable of understanding Indian languages and English, eCommerce categories and products and tasks such as searching for a product, understanding product details, placing an order, among others.
The in-house 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”.
Although digital voice assistants of Big Tech have found acceptance in the Indian market, they are yet to gain relevance and influence owing to the challenge of language diversity in India.
Viewed in this context, Flipkart’s position as a home-grown player capable of understanding Indian shopping behaviour is a massive advantage few can ignore.
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Big Tech in the growing Indian eCommerce market
With Amazon spearheading its India-specific growth initiatives and Reliance’s Jio Marts creating a unique position for itself, the competition in the Indian eCommerce space is expected to get intense.
Jio Platforms generated significant interest in its offering owing to its massive growth over the last couple of years.
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Facebook recently acquired a near 10% stake in Jio Platforms for a whopping $5.7bn – its biggest investment after the Whatsapp acquisition.
Given these challenges, Flipkart’s launch of the new Voice Assitant feature supporting Indian languages is a digital necessity for the Amazon competitor.
Backed by a detailed ethnographic study across India, Flipkart is confident the new feature will enhance the user’s grocery shopping experience further.
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