Flipkart seeks to tap next 200 million users using voice tech amid pandemic

Introduction of 'voice assistant' on grocery is helping Flipkart bring conversational commerce and aims to fast-track adoption of e-commerce by Bharat consumers

For the past few weeks now, Naresh Bajgai, a cook in Bengaluru, has been discovering and buying groceries easily using voice commands in Hindi on e-commerce platform Flipkart. “It’s easier to speak and order just like you talk to a shopkeeper,” said Bajgai. “Also, typing and searching are more difficult than speaking.”

All this was made possible by the recently-launched ‘voice assistant’ a conversational artificial intelligence platform, which has been built by Flipkart’s in-house technology team. The Walmart-owned firm has also ensured the voice of the ‘virtual assistant’ has the Indian accent to connect better with the consumers including Bajgai and they are at ease while talking to it.

Bajgai is one among the next 200 million users or Bharat consumers that Flipkart is eyeing to tap. The introduction of the ‘voice assistant’ on grocery is helping Flipkart bring conversational commerce and aims to fast track the adoption of e-commerce by Bharat consumers. 

“Grocery shopping (using voice technology) is doing pretty well. We have early results which are very successful,” said Jey Venugopal, chief product and technology officer, Flipkart. “We are learning more and improving our assistant and we would be rolling it out across other categories.”

A dedicated team of over 40 people with experts across engineering, product, design, research and data sciences worked over the last couple of years to bring alive this capability. Flipkart also undertook a detailed ethnographic study for a couple of months in multiple towns and cities to gather insights and opportunities which led to the development of  ‘voice assistant’ for grocery. This included defining the Bharat consumer and understanding their different behavioural traits. 

Amit Z, senior director and head for the ‘Next 200 million customers’ initiative at Flipkart, said as a homegrown e-commerce marketplace, the firm has a nuanced understanding of its consumer base.

“This, coupled with our multiple on-ground research expeditions in towns such as Jaipur, Coimbatore and Salem, helped us understand the profile of a Bharat consumer and build solutions for them,” said Amit. “The voice assistant is a big step towards conversational commerce and will help ease their transition to e-commerce.”

For instance, a female customer who had not shopped online before was elated to see the ‘voice assistant’ understand her colloquial command and showcase products accordingly. In other instances, people liked the fact that there was a constant initiation and nudge from the voice assistant saying “Aapko kya chahiye” (What do you want?). This has helped the consumer retain interest through the purchase experience using the voice assistant. Flipkart also identified 30 different pronunciations for a common simple two-syllable brand name.

How is Flipkart’s ‘voice assistant’ able to do it? The platform utilises technologies such as speech recognition, natural language understanding, machine translation, and text-to-speech for Indian languages. It is helping consumers to seamlessly fulfil their needs through e-commerce despite high colloquialism in their language.

The ‘voice assistant’ understands commands in English, Hindi and also a mix of the two languages. For instance, it understands sentences such as  “Sasta aata dena” ( Give me low-priced flour),  “Bill bana dena” (make the bill) or “Saamaan ghar bhijwa dena” (send the stuff I bought to my home). The other commands include “10 kg Aashirvad aata dena” (GIve me 10 kg of Aashirvad brand wheat flour).  

The indigenously developed AI platform is built to automatically detect the language spoken by the user. In real-time, it can transcribe, translate, transliterate and understand the user’s intent to have engaging shopping-related conversations in various Indian languages. These solutions are capable of understanding vernacular languages such as Hindi, e-commerce categories and products. It can understand tasks such as searching for a product, understanding product details and placing an order.

Another e-commerce giant Amazon has also made big strides in the voice shopping technology space. During the recently concluded Prime Day sale in India, Amazon’s voice-activated artificial intelligence assistant Alexa answered over a million requests from customers on the Amazon shopping app. It guided them to the products, best deals, new launches, bill payments and Prime Music.

Amazon introduced voice powered by Alexa to enhance the shopping experience for Indian customers early this year. Amazon customers can simply ‘speak to shop’. The voice-enabled shopping is a new way for customers to engage with Amazon. The launch allowed customers preferring voice to enjoy the ease and convenience of Amazon’s shopping experience.

The customers use voice commands to search products, add them to the cart, proceed to checkout and check the order status. Some of these commands include, “Alexa, show me running shoes, search for chocolates, add Rava idli mix to my cart.”

Customers can search for millions of products across hundreds of categories, add items to cart and track their orders on Amazon India very conveniently using their voice.

Amazon has said voice is the most natural way to interact and engage with customers. It said in a touch the only world, customers are often forced to learn interaction patterns of the apps they interact with. However, Alexa will enable a natural way to interact and converse with customers.

Amazon said voice-based experiences if done right, have the potential to flip the paradigm and change the way customers engage using touch, type and voice functionalities with their smart device. Voice interface saves customers time and cognitive load in typing and thinking of accurate spellings. 

Alexa can understand proper nouns and regional words across various languages. Its vocabulary is available in the context of shopping on the Amazon app. As more customers continue to use voice, Alexa will continue to get smarter day after day. Depending on how customers are using their voice to shop, Alexa will use dynamic learning to get better. Also, Alexa’s deep neural networks and machine learning algorithms will improve the overall shopping experience.

According to analysts, the Covid-19 pandemic would increase the adoption of voice-activated systems such as Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant. A greater focus on online shopping and delivery will drive smart home device adoption to ensure those deliveries are securely delivered.

A report from Juniper Research has found that consumers will interact with voice assistants on over 8.4 billion devices by 2024; overtaking the world’s population and it would be led by smartphones. This is growing 113 per cent compared to the 4.2 billion devices expected to be in use by year-end 2020.

A global emphasis on working from home combined with advice to minimize Covid-19 transmission from shared surfaces even within a home will help cement the benefits of smart home voice control for millions of consumers, according to global tech market advisory firm, ABI Research.

Last year, 141 million voice control smart home devices shipped worldwide. Despite the key China market being impacted during the first quarter of 2020, the value of voice control during the pandemic will ensure that this year, voice control device shipments will grow globally by close to 30 per cent over 2019, states ABI Research.