Earlier this month, Flipkart launched a voice assistant for grocery shopping on its app with support for English, Hindi, and mixed-language commands. This new roll-out with additional language support on its app is an indication that the company wants to tap India’s vernacular internet users. Jeyandran Venugopal, chief product and technology officer at the company, said 58% percent of its user base is situated in tier-2 cities: According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), states where Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada speakers are in majority, has more than 145 million internet users. A report published by KPMG in 2017 suggested that by 2021 India will have more than 88 million people consuming the internet in these three languages.
