Flipkart acquires AI start-up Liv.ai, looks to tap tier 2, 3 cities

By

Maverick Martins

Published
Aug 22, 2018

Leading e-commerce firm Flipkart has strengthened its technology with the acquisition of an artificial intelligence-led speech-recognition start-up Liv.ai.

Flipkart aims to widen its customer base across India with the help of Liv.ai speech-to-text platform, which supports 10 Indian languages. The e-commerce major is confident that Liv’s platform will help it expand in tier 2, 3 cities through conversational e-commerce experience in local languages.
 
As part of the deal, Liv.ai’s co-founders Subodh, Sanjeev, and Kishore, along with the entire Liv team will be joining Flipkart and report to Ravish Sinha, Vice President, Flipkart.

Commenting on the acquisition, Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO, Flipkart in a statement said, “The next wave of growth of Internet users is coming from Tier 2+ cities and 70 percent of these current internet users are native or vernacular language speakers and this proportion is only increasing. Given the complexities in typing on vernacular keyboards, the voice will become a preferred interface for new shoppers.”
 
"We want to give our customers a conversational e-commerce experience and believe that with the voice interface the opportunities are endless including discovery, search, engagement, and transactions. With Liv, we’re one step closer making e-commerce accessible to emerging users,” he added.
 
Subodh Kumar, CEO and co-founder of Liv.ai said, “We are excited with the opportunity that is being presented to scale this up further and make it available to millions of consumers and help them have a deep level e-commerce experience.”
 
Founded in 2015, Liv.ai built speech-to-text converts in 10 Indian languages that include Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam.