BENGALURU, Mar 24: E-commerce platform Meesho on Tuesday announced the launch of ‘Vaani’, a generative AI-powered conversational voice shopping assistant, as it looks to target what it estimates to be a market of 500 million potential users who currently do not shop online.
Dubbed “Vaani – Your Meesho Dost”, the assistant is aimed at users who find typing, filters, and structured keyword searches unintuitive.
It allows shoppers to use natural language to discover products, ask follow-up questions, and complete purchases, mimicking an offline shopping experience, the company said.
During its first phase of rollout in February 2026, the assistant interacted with over 1.5 million users, which Meesho said resulted in a 22 per cent higher conversion rate, alongside lower returns and cancellations.
The SoftBank-backed firm, which currently offers assistant Vaani in English and Hindi, plans to expand it across India and into other regional languages in a phased manner.
The in-house technology stack utilises off-the-shelf Large Language Models (LLMs) that have been fine-tuned on Meesho’s customer data.
Addressing the target demographic, Meesho Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Sanjeev Kumar noted that the focus is on users who are comfortable with basic apps like WhatsApp and Facebook, but find traditional e-commerce interfaces challenging.
This persona exists across smaller towns, villages, and even pockets of Tier-1 cities, he added.
Responding to queries on AI hallucinations and accuracy, Kumar stated the company has built strong guardrails and evaluation metrics.
He noted that Meesho’s previously launched customer support AI voicebot, which currently handles tens of thousands of calls daily, has already yielded better customer experience scores than human agents in scaled areas.
“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. (PTI)
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