India's leading eCommerce portal, Flipkart has introduced voice search that lets you command the portal like a King or Queen. We tried it and it worked about 3 out of 5 times, which we believe is good given our 'Indian' accents. For example, the service quickly realised 'Samsung Galaxy S4' but couldn't figure it out when we said 'The Midas Touch By Robert Kiyosaki'. On multiple tries, the best guess was 'Dutch', which believe came from 'touch'. The developers may already know that this voice search feature comes from Webkit's 'x-webkit-search' attribute and works in all webkit powered browsers. So it's still webkit doing all the processing.


Flipkart isn't the first eCommerce portal in India to introduce the voice based search. But the real question is - will voice search bring more conversions to the site? There can be arguments both in favor and against. First - not every use of Flipkart is good at typing out English words without using SMS language. We'd believe that not majority of them would be good at spoken English as well - at least to an extent their voice instructions can be understood by the system. Secondly, we have doubts how effective is the search for various Indian accents. We'd like all our readers to give it a try and post their results in the comments below. While testing, please do not fake your call center, American accent. Be as natural as you can. We'd like to know how it works for all of you.

Merely searching for the right products may not lead to more conversions. Because the checkout process does require you to fill the details. Ultimately, we believe it's just a nice feature to have but that's all about it.

Do share your thoughts below.