Amazon Alexa won’t work in India, says rival Flipkart’s CTO

NEW DELHI: AI (Artificial intelligence) powered digital assistants are undoubtedly going to be big in future. Realizing the potential for the same, tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon and making constant strides in their development of virtual assistants. If we talk about Amazon, its Alexa voice-assistant powers the company's Echo and Tap smart devices. But according to Peeyush Ranjan, Amazon India's rival Flipkart's Chief Technology Officer, Alexa won't be a success in India.

Speaking at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference, the Flipkart CTO said that Amazon’s Alexa will see a lot of challenges in the country.
“The problems that we see over here [in the US] are not what we see in India. The real challenge we’re going to have to solve is bigger than Alexa.,” said Ranjan.


Some of the challenges Peeyush Ranjan outlined include a wide variety of spoken languages, power outages, network connectivity problems and limited delivery infrastructure.

Rajan said - “There’s a fundamental belief at Flipkart that the way natural commerce happens is the way ecommerce will go, which includes visual elements and sentiment analysis in addition to voice-based commands."

According to a recent report, Amazon India leads over Flipkart in overall website traffic. Per the report, Amazon got between 33% and 62% more monthly traffic than Flipkart from November 2015 to May 2016.

Amazon had average monthly user visits of around 180 million, far more than Flipkart's 120 million. But in terms of app ranking and download numbers, Flipkart leads Amazon on the Google Play Store.