Heena Sharma Blog

Online retailer Flipkart said it has introduced ‘voice assistant’ capability on its platform, to make consumers’ e-commerce journey simpler and more natural. Introduced in Flipkart’s grocery store, Supermart, the ‘voice assistant’ will enable consumers to discover and buy products easily using voice commands in multiple languages, starting with Hindi and English. The voice-first conversational AI platform has been built by Flipkart’s in-house technology team with solutions for speech recognition, natural language understanding, machine translation, and text-to-speech for Indian languages. These solutions are capable of understanding vernacular languages such as Hindi, e-commerce categories and products, and tasks such as searching for a product, understanding product details and placing an order. The AI platform is built to automatically detect the language spoken by the user, and in real-time transcribe, translate, transliterate and understand the user’s intent to have engag...

Hundreds of traders in south Gujarat are giving India’s biggest e-commerce companies a firecracker they don’t want. As a mark of protest against the deep discounts offered by their online counterparts, brick-and-mortar retailers and traders, led by the Surat Mobile Traders Association, are ordering products worth hundreds of crore on ‘cash-on-delivery’ from Amazon, Flipkart and Alibaba. Once the goods arrive though, the traders refuse to take delivery and send it back instead. In doing so, the members of the association claim, they are causing huge losses to India’s online retail firms, as the e-commerce companies take a hit on packaging and courier costs when items are returned. Till date, according to Surat Mobile Traders Association, they have allegedly refused products to the tune of over Rs 500 crore, with plans to ramp their boycott during the Diwali season . “Online companies which are offering various [discount] schemes during this festive season are bein...