Flipkart Flippi - Multi-modal Conversational Assistant

As a product designer, in the Conversation Assistant team, I led the Voice User Interaction (VUI) design to build an interaction model that would help our customers shop online using the Flipkart application.

I collaborated with the developers, and conversational and content designers to realize this solution, as we tried to effectively optimize the interplay of touch, speech, and visual modalities.

During my time in the Conversational Assistant team I was responsible for the entire suite of voice and conversational products on Flipkart. Predominantly, Flipkart had ventured into the voice domain across five different product channels. With the final goal of streamlining these into an integrated multi-modal conversational AI voice assistant; which would eventually roll up to serve as a singular experience for assistance.

• 1. Flippi (Lifestyle Assistant - Category Specific) - a conversational commerce assistant that performed speech-to-text-to-navigation throughout the shopping journey in lifestyle category
• 2. Voice Search - transcribed texts from vernacular speech
• 3. Decision Assistant - Chat bot which helps customers answer customer queries about a product
• 4. Grocery Assistant - a conversational commerce assistant that performed speech-to-text-to-navigation throughout the shopping journey in the grocery category
• 5. Customer Support (CX Bot) - chatbot which assists in customer supports queries

The Grocery Voice Assistant we’ll discuss in this post was Flipkart’s first foray into using voice technology to tap into the emerging markets of India. For Flipkart, India’s largest e-retailer, the next wave of growth was now coming in from customers who are new internet users who come from regions in India where even Hindi is not the first language, forget being able to understand English. For many, using Flipkart might have been their first interaction with technology. Many new internet users struggle with lower literacy and depend on technologies such as voice to help them gain confidence and ease into using products and services such as Flipkart.

This project was a key milestone for me on my journey into the voice industry, as it served as a test for the user understanding and skill set that I had developed while working in Flipkart's Fintech arm. Not only did it provide me with the responsibility I was seeking, but also allowed me to display my horizontal play and develop systemic thinking within Flipkart's growth charter, helping me to continuously enhance my evolving role as a designer and gain valuable insight into adjacent roles.