Flipkart has announced the launch of voice search on its platform, allowing customers to use voice to search for products across all category.
Voice search is currently available in Hindi, English, and a combination of both languages. Voice search was introduced on Flipkart for purchasing grocery last year.
Voice search allows the user to search the product catalog using voice commands.
According to a joint study by Bain & Company and Flipkart, online shoppers in second-tier cities account for nearly half of all shoppers and contribute to three out of five orders on major online sales platforms.
Flipkart also says that consumers who are new to the internet need help with online shopping. Voice search is natural and fast: 3 times faster than typing in English and 5 times faster in Hindi, according to an independent study.
Flipkart uses automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding and text-to-speech for Indian languages, developed by Flipkart’s in-house team of engineers and computer scientists, to offer voice search in Hindi and English.
As soon as the user gives an order, automatic speech recognition recognizes the voice and converts it into text. Here natural language understanding tries to determine the intent and essence from the keywords specified in the command.
These keywords are then picked up by the Flipkart search engine, which provides results for customers in a split second.
Commenting on the launch of this new feature, Jeyandran Venugopal, director of products and technology at Flipkart, said that as a local e-commerce company, Flipkart understands the heterogeneity of the Indian market and wants to solve the problem for the next 200 million online users by meeting the needs of all users to make e-commerce more inclusive. Voice search, along with some of Flipkart’s other initiatives, will make the digital commerce process more convenient, accessible and transparent for the new wave of online shoppers.
