BHUBANESWAR: Homegrown e-commerce giant Flipkart on Tuesday acquired an artificial intelligence (AI)-led speech recognition startup inching closer to break the barrier that has separated the in-store and online experience.
The acquisition is in line with Flipkart’s vision to penetrate deeper into the tier 2 and smaller cities for the next million users, who prefer native language interaction on the web. Flipkart, however, didn’t disclose the deal size.
Founded in 2015, Liv.AI is among the handful of startups to build speech to text APIs that enable low latency speech to text conversion in ten Indian languages that include Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam.“Building a voice interface is complex, and is especially challenging in Indian context given multiple languages and accents. While Flipkart has been solving for quintessential Indian problems, it is an exciting time for us to join in and solve it together. ,” said Subodh Kumar, CEO and Co-founder of Liv.
As part of the deal, co-founders Subodh, Kishore Mundra and Sanjeev Kumar, along with the entire Liv team will be joining Flipkart. The team will act as a center of excellence to drive further developing the voice solutions, integration with Flipkart app and developing use cases for various categories. Voice integration could be available in some parts of the Flipkart platform as early as six to eight months.Holds immense potentialInitially adopted by the financial services sector, the technology is now finding applicability across the spectrum. Experts tracking the space feels it’s only a matter of time that people discover the immense convenience, speed and ease of voice commerce --the next big thing in e-commerce-- and rely on it for online shopping.
“The next wave of growth of Internet users is coming from Tier 2+ cities and 70% of these current internet users are native/vernacular language speakers and this proportion is only increasing. Given the complexities in typing on vernacular keyboards, voice will become a preferred interface for new shoppers. With Liv, we’re one step closer making e-commerce accessible to emerging users.” said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO, Flipkart.
According to KPMG findings, Hindi internet user base is likely to outgrow English user base by 2021 and along with Marathi and Bengali users will drive the volume growth as 9 out of every 10 new internet users will be Indian language users.
So, if the 100-crore voice-and speech recognition market in India has to grow, it will have to be led by software that supports multiple regional language. Arch rival Amazon has also expanded its virtual assistant Alexa’s natural language understanding to fully comprehend context and intent, even if the sentence include Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi or Kannada words.