Meesho Bets Big On Voice Commerce; Will India Respond?

Somewhere in the bustling market of a tier II town, a woman walks into a fabric store.

She points to a kurta and says, “Bhaiya, ye dikhao… is colour ka, is range mein” (Show me this article, in this colour and in this price range). No search bar. No filters. No English. Just a plain and simple conversation, followed by a smile and a nod, and three options on the counter.

This is the template that Meesho wants to bring to your phone screen — conversational, vernacular and entirely natural. 

Earlier this week, the Bengaluru-based horizontal ecommerce giant launched Vaani, billing it as India’s first GenAI-powered conversational voice shopping assistant. 

Unlike Amazon’s Rufus and Flipkart’s Flippi voice AI agents that only aid in product discovery and react to prompts, Vaani is an end-to-end purchase journey tool that aids with product discovery, comparison, selecting payment method, and confirming delivery details — all within the conversational flow.

Meesho’s standalone voice assistant is targeting the potential 500 Mn shoppers in tier II and smaller markets, who may find traditional ecommerce interfaces like typing and complex filters unintuitive.

The listed ecommerce major, which claims to have 251 Mn annual transacting users, appears to have already cracked the digitally curious consumer in the smaller towns of the country. It reported its highest-ever annual order volume at 1.8 Bn in FY25, as per its IPO documents. 

Meesho is now targeting users who need assistance to shop online. The users who hand their phones to their family members to place an order.

With its voice and vernacular-first AI agent, Meesho is looking to fundamentally expand the addressable market for ecommerce in India.

The Voice-First Opportunity In India

With an army of 650-690 Mn smartphone users, India is at the centre of the voice commerce market opportunity, projected to grow roughly at 13.6% annually, according to an MR’s Voice Commerce Services Market report.

The report notes that voice interfaces are being incorporated into ecommerce apps and payment wallets to enable new internet users and those not yet comfortable with English to make purchases. This user base is mobile-first but not necessarily app-native. It is also vernacular-first and voice-first in behaviour.

Search on ecommerce platforms conventionally requires familiarity with product terminology, comfort with the English language and the ability to navigate filters and categories. Industry observers say that voice agents can bridge this gap by helping users access the internet in their own native languages, rather than keyword-heavy search queries.

“Instead of structured queries, users can describe intent in everyday language  like – ‘Sasta kurta dikhao’; ‘Yeh aur colour mein milega?’; ‘Delivery kab tak aayega?’,” Meesho cofounder and chief technology officer (CTO) Sanjeev Kumar said.

Where Does Vaani Fit In The Meesho Puzzle?

Meesho’s voice AI push builds on its long-standing focus on value-conscious users in non-metro markets. To solve for this cohort, the company has embedded AI and ML in discovery, pricing, logistics and trust systems across its platform. 

Vaani, Kumar said, is a natural extension of this effort. The assistant is designed to support users across the entire shopping journey by understanding intent, asking follow-up questions, and guiding users through decisions. 

Currently, the assistant is available in English and Hindi. Meesho plans to expand to more Indian languages over time.

But beyond the hype, there appears to be healthy traction for the feature. “Only about 10% of users used voice-based search earlier… With the assistant, nearly 40% of users who have access to it are now using voice to find products and navigate their shopping journey,” Kumar added.

The shift is significant, not just in adoption but also in how voice conversations have translated into meaningful transactions during early implementation.

He explained, earlier, voice search converted (into transactions) lower than text due to noisy, unstructured queries and limited understanding. With the conversational assistant, conversion is now significantly higher, as it not only interprets intent better but also guides users through decision-making and purchase with follow-up questions.

Meesho’s CTO told Inc42 that over 1.5 Mn users have interacted with the assistant within a month of its launch. “We also saw a 22% higher conversion rate for Meesho users who interacted with this tool.”

For Meesho, this has direct implications for unit economics. The horizontal ecommerce platform’s moat has long been lower AOV and high-volume transactions. Hence, any jump in order conversion directly feeds into their top line.

The voice AI feature also serves another purpose. For a company that has previously been grappling with cart abandonment, heavy cash-on-delivery dependence, cancellations and returns, Vaani could likely nudge users toward prepaid transactions by building greater confidence during the buying process. 

However, Vaani does not replace the traditional search engine, as it builds on top of it. As per Kumar, the AI assistant goes beyond existing search by acting as a guided layer across the shopping journey, helping customers with discovery, clarifications, comparisons, and even completing actions like placing an order.

“What may appear as fuzzy, conversational queries are actually richer in context. The intelligence layer structures the customer voice into clear attributes and intent, which improves product discovery and supports better recommendations,” Kumar noted.

Can Vaani Find Its Voice?

Despite the early traction, Meesho’s voice commerce bet is not without its challenges. For one, Vaani currently focuses largely on pre-purchase interactions, helping users discover products and complete transactions. 

However, post-purchase workflows, such as returns, refunds, cancellations, and issue resolution, remain significantly more complex and dependent on human intervention. Kumar acknowledged that these areas are the next frontier for voice-led commerce.

But extending conversational AI into these domains will require higher levels of accuracy, deeper contextual understanding and tighter integration with backend systems

“Conversational AI agents have faced hallucinations and challenges in ticket resolutions on commerce platforms, but as models evolve, the agents will get better at addressing these inefficiencies,” Kumar said.

Ensuring reliability and trust will be critical as users begin to rely on voice interfaces for high-stakes decisions such as payments and order management. Bridging user trust, especially for demographics that are not digitally savvy, would be another challenge.

In addition, there is the customer adoption curve. While voice interfaces may be more intuitive, they still require users to trust digital systems in ways they may not be accustomed to. 

Even as voice AI itself is not a uniquely differentiated innovation in ecommerce, what differentiates Meesho is not the technology but the user segment it wants to target.

By focusing on multilingual, voice-first users, many of whom are not comfortable with English or text-based interfaces, the company is attempting to solve for a gap that remains largely underserved. So, can Vaani make India’s hesitant internet users into confident online shoppers?

Edited By Shishir Parasher

Creatives By Abhyam Gusai

The post Meesho Bets Big On Voice Commerce; Will India Respond? appeared first on Inc42 Media.