Bengaluru, August 21, 2018: Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce marketplace, has acquired Liv.ai, an AI led speech recognition startup that has developed a speech to text platform supporting 10 Indian languages. Liv has achieved this feat with exceptional accuracy by leveraging proprietary technology architecture and deep learning algorithms. Post the acquisition, Liv will become a Flipkart center of excellence for Voice solutions, and help accelerate an end-to-end conversational shopping experience for its users.
Strategic Rationale
The acquisition is line with Flipkart's vision to solve e-commerce through technology innovations and will help build voice and speech capabilities to help get the next 200 million online shoppers, who will prefer native language interaction on the web.
Market Trend: The next wave of growth of Internet users is coming from Tier 2+ cities. 70% of these current internet users are native / vernacular language speakers and this proportion is increasing.
User Challenge: Given the complexities in typing on vernacular keyboards, voice will become a preferred interface for new shoppers.
Data: 90% of the new users coming online in India are native language speakers and typing and searching in English is complex for them. The Hindi internet user base is likely to outgrow the English user base by 2021 and along with Marathi and Bengali users will drive the volume growth.
Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO, Flipkart, said, "With Liv, we're one step closer making e-commerce accessible to emerging users. The voice interface will enable countless opportunities including discovery, search, engagement, transactions etc.".
Liv.ai Details and Integration
Founding: Founded in 2015, Liv.ai is the first Indian company to build speech to text APIs in 10 Indian languages.
Technology: The company surmounted challenging problems, given the multiple languages and accents in the Indian context, to deliver a remarkable Speech recognition solution.
Team: Liv.ai's co-founders Subodh Kumar, Sanjeev, and Kishore, along with the entire Liv team, will be joining Flipkart. The team will act as a center of excellence under the leadership of Ravish Sinha, Vice President Flipkart.
About Flipkart:
Flipkart is India's largest e-commerce marketplace with a registered customer base of over 100 million. Launched in 2007, Flipkart has over 100,000 registered sellers and offers over 80 million products across 80+ categories. Flipkart is known for pioneering industry-first innovations such as Cash on Delivery, No Cost EMI and easy returns.
For media queries, contact: sheetal.s@flipkart.com/9891462813.
