Pakistani e-commerce startup successfully integrates voice search

A Pakistani e-commerce startup, Shopsy.pk, has successfully integrated voice feature on its website, enabling customers to search for and order products online using vocal commands. 

Shopsy.pk is an e-commerce startup and lets customers compare prices of products from more than 250 online stores and order them for delivery. 

The technology integrated on the website is similar to how voice search works on Google. Customers can click the 'mic' icon on the website and enable the feature. The feature is able to pick up various local accents and pronunciations, returning results within seconds. 

“At Shopsy, one of the problems we are working on solving is enabling 80 million+ online Pakistanis to quickly and easily search for products. Our pursuit of a frictionless experience led us to explore something that is very natural to us all, using our voice. We feel that a seamless voice search experience is (part of) the answer to introducing more Pakistanis to online shopping," said the CEO Usama Arjumand.

According to Google, India has seen a 270pc year-on-year increase in voice search queries, with 9 out of 10 customers using voice search being of Indian origin. 

Pakistan, having demographic and regional similarities, can be expected to follow a similar trend. 

“Although Shopsy can partly understand the Urdu language, we hope to give users fully native Urdu language support in the future, said Shopsy’s Head of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Faraz Khalid.

The feature on the website is currently limited to the Chrome browser and Android devices. However, it would be interesting to see what kind of adoption voice search gets on the e-commerce start-up and whether other Pakistani websites and apps will follow suit. 

In a country such as Pakistan, where almost 40pc of the population is unable to read or write, voice search may be the key to bringing online shopping to the masses.