Flipkart enables voice search in Hindi, English

Ecommerce platform Flipkart has dropped a voice search on its platform that will allow customers to search for products by speaking in English, Hindi or Hinglish.

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 percent of Internet users in India come from non-English speaking backgrounds.

The ecommerce giant further said that consumers who are new to the internet require assistance in searching for products and the voice search feature will address the requirement.

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.

It will also allow Flipkart to compete with Amazon’s Alexa-powered voice search.

Here’s how to use voice search in Flipkart

Flipkart’s voice search can be accessed on its Android mobile app or site in the initial stage. Mobile users can tap the microphone icon, which appears once you tap the search bar and then simply speak in English or Hindi the item you are looking for on Flipkart.

Flipkart said it had begun a gradual rollout of the feature in January 2021 and had already noticed five million queries a day. For now, the voice search feature seems limited to the Flipkart app and website on Android.