Red Envelope: Voice goes last mile in India

We hosted Dave Isbitski, the Chief Voice evangelist at Amazon eight months ago. During the discussion, we asked Dave if Amazon was planning to focus on vernacular in Asia - particularly India. He mentioned it is a tough engineering problem to solve, and Amazon's focus is to ensure they get the English speaking markets right.

Voice is the new UI, and in a country like India where a Billion people need assistance to use their phone, vernacular voice assistants become indispensable. Over the years, the technology had challenges penetrating the India market, as a good NLP engine needs a lot of relevant data to be trained. To get the data, the rural population in India need to have internet access.

In this episode, Sachin Jaiswal the CEO of Niki AI joins Arun Krishnakumar. Sachin and his team at Niki AI have seen the evolution of the rural smartphone user in India. Through a lot of on the ground market research, they have now developed a product, with proprietary technology that serves as a voice assistant for the India market. Niki delivers voice based transactions in four different languages to its customers in India.

Sachin describes how onboarding of 330 Million people to the internet in less than 3 years has created a leap frog moment in India. Thanks to Reliance Jio, even farmers can use smart phones at the nook and corners of the country. Niki AI have cleverly timed their product for this market.

No wonder Ratan Tata is an investor in Niki. Listen in for more insights from Niki's Sachin Jaiswal.

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