Walmart-owned Flipkart has introduced an AI voice assistant in its grocery business called Supermart.
This voice assistant enables consumers to discover and buy products easily using voice commands currently available in English and Hindi, however, the company plans to make it be available in vernacular languages as well.
Users can avail this new feature on Flipkart’s mobile app on Android devices and will be gradually launching on iOS and the website.
This feature is built by Flipkart’s technology team for speech recognition, natural language understanding, machine translation, and text-to-speech solutions. The e-commerce market place says that this new feature aims to make consumers’ shopping experience simpler and more natural.
According to Flipkart, the voice assistant can understand 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.
Flipkart has taken detailed ethnographic study for over five months in multiple towns and cities to gather insights and opportunities which led to the development of voice assistant for grocery.
Jeyandran Venugopal, chief product and technology officer, Flipkart, says, “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.”
