Flipkart acquires speech recognition start-up Liv.ai

TIL Desk/Business/Bengaluru/ India’s leading e-tailer Flipkart on Tuesday said it had acquired artificial intelligence (AI)-led speech recognition start-up Liv.ai to solve the language-barrier problem for its customers across the country.

“Acquisition of Liv.ai positions us to solve the language barrier problem for adoption of e-commerce as the start-up has developed speech-to-text platform in nine Indian languages,” said the retail giant Walmart-owned e-commerce firm in a statement here.

Though the city-based company did not disclose the acquisition cost, a company source said the start-up had been bought for $40 million (Rs 279 crore). The speech recognition is in Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu.

“The acquisition is in line with our vision to build e-commerce for everyone and help provide conversational shopping experience to our users,” said Flipkart Chief Executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy. Founded in 2015, Liv.ai is the first Indian firm to build speech-to-text APIs (Application Programming Interface) that enable low latency speech to text conversion in major Indian languages.