Flipkart enables voice search in Hindi, English

BENGALURU: E-commerce marketplace Flipkart on Thursday introduced voice search in Hindi, English as well as Hinglish on its platform to enable customers to search from a pool of over 150 million products across over 80 categories through speech.

Flipkart said that the introduction of the voice search feature will enable faster onboarding of customers from smaller towns and simplify their e-commerce journey.

More than 75 per cent of Internet users in India come from non-English speaking backgrounds.

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

"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," Jeyandran Venugopal, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Flipkart, said in a statement.

The voice search is capable of helping users search through the product catalogue using colloquial commands.

To enable voice search in Hindi and English, Flipkart deployed a host of technical capabilities such as 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.