Only having recently launched a new e-commerce platform in 2GUD, where the Indian brand for refurbished goods, Flipkart is making further waves in the market. This time with the acquisition of Liv.ai, an artificial intelligence start-up, that has built a platform wherein speech could be converted into text in 10 Indian languages.
Liv.ai is the brainchild of three former IIT graduates in Subodh Kumar, Kishore Mundra and Sanjeev Kumar. The platform is supposedly able to convert 10 Indian languages that of Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam into text. The price associated with the deal remains more or less disclosed, it is still believed to be around 40 million, as first reported by Economic Times.
Liv.ai’s 20-member team are expected to be part of Flipkart’s Voice Solutions team and help them integrate, accelerate and end to end conversational shopping experience for its vast user base. Liv’s founders
Stepping Into the New-Age
“We work on speech recognition, and surrounding technologies and these will be extremely valuable to any company that wants to target the Indian customer base of 100-200 million,” said Subodh Kumar, chief executive of Liv. “Voice is a much better and effortless interface, and it will increase the buying propensity and their intention to buy, and ease of use will increase on an e-commerce platform.”
With the acquisition of Liv.ai, Flipkart has taken the necessary steps to enter a new age of technology when it comes to online shopping. Flipkart, with this acquisition of Liv.ai, is targetting a further 200 million customers, as part of their approach for Tier 2 and areas beyond that. The idea is to encourage shoppers to have a presence on the site from these places, for technology as complicated as it might get at times, needs to be simplified. Speech to text is not something new, but CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy believes its the next phase of innovation, in the same bracket as touch. Voice could help even those who find it profoundly challenging to navigate around devices or are very much new to the internet.
Language a Barrier?
Research conducted by Google along with consultants Bain & Company and Philanthropic venture fund Omidyar Network revealed that around 54 million users from last year alone, completely stopped online shopping after their first purchase. It was also revealed that this particular group of shoppers comprised mostly of either first time internet users from lower income groups who are more comfortable with vernacular languages.
Tier 2+ cities have the next wave of internet users, while around 70% of these users are likely to prefer vernacular language based options. CEO Krishnamurthy said, “Given the complexities in typing on vernacular keyboards, the voice can become a preferred interface for new shoppers.”
So ideally Flipkart are taking the necessary steps to appeal to an audience who might be shying away from the online shopping experience and the understanding is that this platform would be ready for consumer use in the next 6-8 months.
Like CEO Krishnamurthy mentioned about the complexities a vernacular keyboard might pose to users, a speech to text idea could be appealing, easy to use and help any transaction to be faster and much efficient. With competition also set to be expected in voice to text technology, with Alexa already has a global player in Alexa, and could well use the technology to come with new forms of communication, just like how Flipkart are planning to implement for online shopping purposes. Flipkart, however, could be looking to establish themselves in the Tier 2+ places as the trusted and go to brand for consumers.
Will the home-grown e-commerce biggie plan for devices like Amazon Echo – Alexa or Google Home – Assistant, soon? Let us know what do you think about this acquisition.
The post Flipkart Acquires AI Startup Liv.ai to Begin the ‘Voice’ Revolution; Takes on Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant? appeared first on MySmartPrice.
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