Flipkart launches voice search in Hindi and English

Flipkart has announced the introduction of voice search on its platform to enable customers to search products across categories through speech.

At present, the voice search is available in Hindi, English, and a blend of both. Notably, the voice search was introduced last year in Flipkart for grocery purchases.

Voice Search is capable of helping users search through the product catalogue using colloquial commands.

According to a joint study conducted by Bain & Company and Flipkart in 2020, online shoppers in tier-2 cities make up nearly half of all shoppers and contribute to three out of every five orders for leading e-retail platforms.

Flipkart also says the new-to-internet consumers need assistance in online shopping and searching through voice is both natural and quicker as it is 3x faster than typing in English and 5x faster in Hindi, as per independent studies.

To enable Voice Search in Hindi and English, Flipkart uses Automatic Speech Recognition, Natural Language Understanding, and Text-to-Speech for Indian languages, built by Flipkart’s in-house engineering and data sciences team.

Once a user gives a command, the automatic speech recognition recognises the voice and converts it into text. Here, the Natural Language Understanding tries to identify the intent and entity from the keywords given in the command.

These keywords are then picked up by Flipkart’s state-of-the-art search engine, which fetches results for the customers in a fraction of a second.

Commenting on the introduction of the new capability, Jeyandran Venugopal, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Flipkart, said, “As a homegrown e-commerce company, Flipkart understands the heterogeneity of the Indian market and is committed to solving for the next 200 million users online while catering to the needs of all users to make e-commerce more inclusive. Voice search, along with some of the other initiatives by Flipkart, will make the digital commerce experience more convenient, accessible, and seamless for the new wave of online shoppers.”