Flipkart introduces voice assistant capability for grocery store

Walmart-owned Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart is rolling out an AI powered voice assistant feature to its platform.

This currently supports the venture’s grocery store, called Supermart, although the plan is to extend it to other verticals. The feature began rolling out to Android users this week and Flipkart is also looking to bring it to its iOS app.

The assistant, which was built by the retailer’s in-house tech team, supports Hindi and English and will also understand more languages in the future. Users can explore deals and offers, filter results, add multiple items to cart, receive contextual suggestions, and check-out using conversational voice commands.

Jeyandran Venugopal, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Flipkart, says: “As a homegrown e-commerce company, we have 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.”

“The technology team 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 the voice assistant also aligns well with the growing adoption and comfort of consumers towards voice-based online commerce.”