With AI transforming shopping experiences by making them more intuitive, personalised, and accessible, Meesho has launched 'Vaani', a generative AI-powered conversational voice shopping assistant.
The ecommerce platform targets what it estimates to be a market of 500 million potential users who do not yet shop online.
Dubbed 'Vaani – Your Meesho Dost', this AI assistant will support users who are not comfortable with typing, filters, and structured keyword searches.
Vaani will enable shoppers to use natural language to discover products, ask follow-up questions, and complete purchases, mimicking an offline shopping experience, the company said.
The first phase of the rollout last month saw the assistant interacting with over 1.5 million users. The company said that it led to a 22% higher conversion rate, along with lower returns and cancellations.
The SoftBank-backed firm currently offers assistant Vaani in English and Hindi, and plans to expand it across India and into other regional languages in a phased manner.
The in-house technology stack utilises off-the-shelf LLMs (large language models) that have been fine-tuned on Meesho's customer data.
Meesho Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Sanjeev Kumar said the platform is targeting users who are comfortable using basic apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook, but often find traditional ecommerce interfaces difficult to navigate. This segment, he noted, spans smaller towns and villages, as well as certain pockets within Tier-1 cities.
Addressing concerns around AI hallucinations and accuracy, Kumar said the company has put in place robust guardrails and evaluation frameworks. He added that Meesho’s previously launched AI-powered customer support voicebot—now handling tens of thousands of calls daily has already delivered higher customer experience scores than human agents in scaled deployments.
"At Meesho, AI has always been at the core of how we build for scale. With over 251 million annual transacting users, we have a deep understanding of how India shops, and that allows us to anticipate and solve consumer needs in ways that very few platforms can," Kumar said.
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