Flipkart acquired artificial intelligence startup Liv.ai.

India’s e-commerce giant Flipkart has acquired artificial intelligence (AI) startup Liv.ai, which has built a platform that translates speech to text in 10 Indian languages . The acquisition comes at a time when large online retail firms are doubling down and investing heavily on getting access to the next 100 million Internet users in tier-2 and tier-3 cities and towns across India.

As part of this acquisition, the 20-member team of Liv will be part of Flipkart’s ‘voice solutions’ team and help accelerate an end-to- end conversational shopping experience for its users. Voice integration could be available in some parts of the Flipkart platform as early as 6-8 months. 
Launched in 2015 by three IIT-Kharagpur graduates, Subodh Kumar, Kishore Mundra and Sanjeev Kumar, , Liv claims to be the only company in India to be able to convert speech to text in nine regional languages including Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi and Tamil, apart from English. 

In an interview earlier today, Flipkart chief executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy said Flipkart would continue to invest heavily on new technologies, especially in areas such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, and indicated that the online retailer would not shy away from making big, bold acquisitions to boost its own offerings.
“We will not just consider it, we will chase it down,” said Krishnamurthy, when asked about further technology acquisitions that can be integrated within Flipkart.

This development comes as e commerce companies in India have shifted their focus to tier II and beyond areas and target the next 200-300 million online shoppers. However, this is where the barrier of language comes in. 
According to a nine months long research conducted by Google, consultants Bain & Company and philanthropic venture fund Omidyar Network, 54 million users stopped online transaction after their first purchase in the last year. This group comprises mostly first time internet users from lower income groups who are more comfortable with vernacular languages than English.