Flipkart Acquires AI Speech Recognition Startup Liv.Ai to Boost Voice-Based Shopping

India'southward leading east-tailer Flipkart has caused artificial intelligence (AI)-led spoken language recognition startup Liv.ai to solve the language-barrier problem for its customers across the country.

"Acquisition of Liv.ai positions us to solve the language barrier problem for adoption of e-commerce as the startup has adult speech-to-text platform in nine Indian languages," said the retail behemothic Walmart-owned eastward-commerce business firm in a argument here.

Though the Bengaluru-based company did not disclose the acquisition price, a visitor source said the start-up had been bought for $twoscore million (Rs 279 crore). The voice communication recognition is in Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marāthi, Malayalam Panjabi, Tamil, and Telugu. "The acquisition is in line with our vision to build e-commerce for everyone and assist provide conversational shopping experience to our users," said Flipkart Main Executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy.

Founded in 2015, Liv.ai is the first Indian house to build voice communication-to-text APIs (Application Programming Interface) that enable low latency speech to text conversion in major Indian languages. "Liv has achieved the feat with accuracy past leveraging proprietary engineering architecture and deep learning algorithms. Liv will get our centre of excellence for voice solutions," the argument added.

The start-upwards will help build voice and speech capabilities for getting more online shoppers who may adopt native linguistic communication interactions on the web. "The next moving ridge of growth of Internet users will be from Tier-2 cities, with 70 per cent of them vernacular language speakers. Given the complexities in typing on vernacular keyboards, voice will become a preferred interface for new shoppers," said Krishnamurthy.

As per industry studies, 90 per cent of the new users are native language speakers and typing and searching in English is complex for them. "Hindi Internet user base is likely to outgrow English user base by 2021, and along with Marathi and Bengali users will bulldoze the volume growth, as nine out of every x new Internet users will be Indian linguistic communication speakers," pointed out the statement.

The phonation interface also offers huge opportunities to customers to discover, search, engage and transact online in real-fourth dimension. "Edifice a vocalisation interface is circuitous and challenging in Indian context, given multiple languages and accents. At Liv, nosotros overcame many problems to evangelize a speech recognition solution for India," said Liv co-founder and Master Executive Subodh Kumar.

As the state's largest eastward-commerce player, the xi-yr-old Flipkart grouping includes Myntra, Jabong and PhonePe. It offers eighty million products in 80 categories. In fiscal 2017-xviii, Flipkart recorded Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) of $7.v billion and net sales of $4.six billion, representing l per cent twelvemonth-on-twelvemonth growth.

Source: https://beebom.com/flipkart-acquires-liv-ai/

Posted by: wilsonspingired.blogspot.com

Share this post