India’s largest e-commerce firm
Flipkart has acquired artificial intelligence (AI) startup Liv.ai, which has
built a platform that translates speech to text in 10 Indian languages. The
acquisition comes at a time when large online retail firms are doubling down
and investing heavily on getting access to the next 100 million Internet users
in tier-2 and tier-3 cities and towns across India.
After the acquisition is completed,
Liv.ai will be integrated into Flipkart Center of Excellence for Voice
Solutions, as it looks to leverage the startup’s technology and build its
capabilities around so-called conversational shopping. For
Flipkart, this buyout is crucial as it potentially helps the online retailer
overcome the language barrier problem, an issue faced by most leading consumer
internet companies.
Flipkart’s
arch-rival Amazon.com Inc. has also bet on voice and speech-recognition
technology globally and come out with new offerings in the form of AI-powered
virtual assistant Alexa. Liv.ai is one of a handful of startups to build
technology that converts speech to text in 10 Indian languages that include
Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and
Malayalam. Prior to being sold to Flipkart, the startup had raised funding from
investors such as Astarc Ventures.
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