News Highlight: Flipkart buys text to speech converter Liv.ai for an undisclosed amount of money.
India’s giant online retailer Flipkart Internet Pvt Ltd, commonly known as Flipkart, has bought speech recognition AI startup Liv.ai in a bid to overcome the language difficulties across India.
The announcement was released by the chief executive officer ( CEO ) namely Kalyan Krishnamurthy of Flipkart in an interview early in the morning today.
Liv.ai, a Bangalore, Karnataka based speech recognition startup, has created an application program interface ( API ) that identifies and converts text into audio or speech format real-time basis. The platform currently supports ten largely spoken local languages including Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam.
Mr. Krishnamurthy during the time of interview said that developing a voice API isn’t so easy especially in a country like India where a variety of languages with a different accent are spoken. Liv.ai, after spending a lot of time on research has brought a solution to this complexity, he added.
Liv.ai is a Bangalore based AI startup that is focused on bringing forward voice-based interfaces so that Indian people, who speak multiple languages, could be accurately listened, understood, and served better in their own local languages.
The AI startup was brought into existence by three IIT Kharagpur students viz Subodh Kumar, Sanjeev Kumar and Kishore Mundra in the year 2015. Subodh Kumar has previously worked as a research engineer at Microsoft.
CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy further said that Flipkart will keep on investing in artificial intelligence and machine learning technology so that the company performs more efficiently and effectively in the future. The intention behind our investments is just to serve better our domestic market.
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