Flipkart launches voice search feature with Hindi and English support

Flipkart officially launched the voice search feature on its e-commerce platform on Thursday. The feature is available in English and Hindi. Flipkart previously offered a voice assistant feature on its platform, but was limited to grocery services.

According to Flipkart, the voice search feature has been rolling out gradually since January of this year. Since its deployment, it has recorded more than 5 million requests per day.

Citing studies (conducted by Flipkart), he said voice search was both natural and faster. The company said it was 3 times faster than typing in English and 5 times faster in Hindi according to independent studies. Flipkart adds that the voice search feature will also help better understand new users who are primarily from non-metropolitan / Tier 1 cities. For sellers, the feature will allow them to enter a larger market, the company added.

From a technological standpoint, Flipkart said it has deployed several capabilities such as automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding, and text-to-speech for Indian languages. The technologies were developed and deployed by the company s internal engineering and data science team.

Once a user gives a command, automatic speech recognition recognizes the voice and converts it to text. Here, natural language understanding attempts to identify intent and entity from the keywords given in the command. These keywords are then retrieved by Flipkart’s state-of-the-art search engine, which retrieves results for customers in a fraction of a second, explained Flipkart.

Flipkart added that its voice search merges these technologies with existing text search capability. The technologies also help the application to better understand long and complex natural language-based queries made by users with different accents.

As a local e-commerce company, Flipkart understands the heterogeneity of the Indian market and is committed to solving the problem of the following 200 million users online while 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 experience more convenient, accessible and transparent for the new wave of online shoppers, said Jeyandran Venugopal, Director of Products and Technology at Flipkart in a press release.