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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