E-commerce giants Flipkart on Thursday (March 4) launched a voice search feature on it platform that will enable customers to search for items by speaking about them in Hindi and English.
In a statement, Flipkart said that this new feature will enable faster onboarding of customers for smaller towns while simplifying their e-commerce journey.
"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.
Citing studies conducted internally, Flipkart said in a press release that consumers who are new-to-Internet in India need help in online shopping and look for easy discovery of products. The voice research facility will be useful in addressing both these requirements.
It will also aide in competing with Amazon’s Alexa-powered voice search. In India, more than 75 percent of Internet users come from non-English speaking backgrounds.
Quoting independent studies, Flipkart said that searching through voice is three times faster than typing in English and five times faster in Hindi. This new feature will also make it
How to use Flipkart voice search
You can access voice search either on Flipkart mobile app on its mobile site for android users. In the search bar, click on the microphone icon. Then, you can use voice search to speak whether in English or Hindi to find items on the e-commerce website.
Flipkart has stated that it had been gradually rolling out voice search since January 2021 and has till now experienced over five million queries a day. However, the facility is only available to android user as of now.
The e-commerce website has deployed various technical capabilities to enable voice search in Hindi and English, which includes natural language understanding, automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech for Indian languages, built by its in-house engineering and data sciences team.
Flipkart took to Twitter on Thursday to announce the launch of the new voice search facility.
