Flipkart is in advanced talks to acquire artificial intelligence company Liv.ai. This is as per a news report in the Economic Times.
The transaction could see the homegrown online retailer shell out around $40 million for Liv.ai, one of them said, adding that the transaction is “in the final stages”.
According to an ‘Accenture Consumer Survey’ of 2018 & TRAI report (Oct-Dec 2017) over 150 million internet users in India are likely to own a digital voice assistant by 2019.
The acquisition will help Flipkart add ‘voice’ to its platform—similar to Amazon’s and Google’s virtual assistants—and unlock the next ‘big opportunity’ in India. It also marks Flipkart deepening focus on AI over the last several months with the e-tailer looking to make acquisitions around the technology.
The development comes right after US retail giant Walmart completed its $16-billion acquisition of Flipkart, which included a fresh infusion of $2 billion.
Liv.ai has developed a system that enables voice recognition and can handle speech-to-text translation in English and nine regional languages including Kannada, Marathi and Punjabi. This, experts said, would help Flipkart compete against technologies like Amazon Alexa, which can understand Hindi along with certain regional phonetics and English with an Indian accent.
Liv.ai has raised angel funding from investors including Astrac Ventures and former Flipkart executive Amod Malviya. Sales of Amazon’s and Google’s virtual assistant-powered smart speakers are gradually picking up in India’s metro cities.
Experts tracking the space said Flipkart’s acquisition of Liv.ai will also open a world of opportunity in tier-III towns and beyond. They said ‘voice’ will be the next revolution and companies can build entire ecosystems around it with commerce apps and chat apps, among others.
“Voice is an interface, so it is not just these devices but it is for the smartphone which is in your hand all the time,” said Umakant Soni, founding partner of pi Ventures, who has noticed several people in small towns using voice search even in app stores. “There is a whole new market where consumers have this new magic device in their hands… they may not even know the language or how to read and write, but they know how to speak.”
Flipkart had said in December that it would make acquisitions around AI and pump in hundreds of millions of dollars to build AI and machine learning solutions to enhance the online shopping experience and shorten delivery timelines, among other things. ET reported in February that Flipkart was looking to invest over $25 million in acquiring at least one AI startup.
Four years ago, Subodh Kumar along with his IIT Kharagpur batchmates Kishore Mundra and Sanjeev Kumar set up a speech-recognition software company called Liv.ai. Currently, the startup has over 500 business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) developers using its speech-recognition application program interface (API) for their apps and products. Liv.ai supports 10 regional languages and plans to add many more.
Subodh Kumar, a tech entrepreneur in his early 30s, has spent almost half a decade of his career working in artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics in New York, Hong Kong and Singapore.