Voice Support for E-commerce

Businesses in India
 October 20, 2021

Contents

1 State of E-commerce in India 4

1.1 Internet Penetration and smartphones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2 E-commerce: Market Size . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.3 Latest Activities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.3.1 Corporate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.3.2 Governments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.3.3 Startups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

2 Tier II+ cities and E-commerce 10

2.1 Advantage Tier II+ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.2 Vernacular users . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.3 Local Businesses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

3 Voice as a Service (VaaS) 15

4 Stories 17
4.1 Amazon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
4.2 Flipkart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

5 IndiaSpeaks 18

6 Insights & Discussion 20

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ABSTRACT
Fuelled by tremendous reach of high speed internet, Indian e-commerce business is witness-
ing a rapid growth in Tier II+ cities. In India, 92% of population living in these areas is ready to
ride this e-commerce train. To instill trust, create long term engagement and to provide per-
sonalized experience, it is imperative that these customers are served in their preferred choice
of communication. This means that the e-commerce interfaces should be re-calibrated to in-
corporate local language interface, local language customer support, vernacular voice search
capabilities and chatbots. This document provides detailed insight into this problem with mar-
ket analysis and evidence from information aggregated from various sources.

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1 STATE OF E-COMMERCE IN INDIA

The Indian E-commerce industry—thanks to unprecedented reach of internet penetration—
is on upward growth trajectory and is expected to surpass the US to become second largest
E-commerce market in the world by 2034. Increasing smartphone penetration, adoption of
4G/5G network effectuating the access to high speed internet, and increased consumer wealth
is expected to catapult the Indian E-commerce market to US $ 200 billion by 2026.
According to a report published by IAMAI and Kantar Research, internet users in India are
expected to reach 900 million by 2025 from 622 million in 2020, increasing at a CAGR of 45%.
Also, driven by high consumer demand post-lockdown, the smartphone shipments reached
150 million units and 5G smartphone shipments crossed 4 million in 2020. Stable and high-
speed internet access and widespread smartphone use provide the necessary support system
for e-commerce business to operate on. In this chapter we review the growth of E-commerce
in Indian context. We begin with a comprehensive survey on internet penetration in India and
use of smartphones. Next, we provide a detailed breakdown of the E-commerce market in In-
dia. In next section we summarize latest activities and initiatives from large e-commerce firms
as well as central and local governments.

1.1 INTERNET PENETRATION AND SMARTPHONES

As of September 2020, driven by the
‘Digital India’ program, a government
of India initiative, the number of inter-
net connections in India significantly in-
creased to 776.45 million. According
to a IAMAI and Kantar report, rural In-
dia may have a higher number of inter-
net users compared to urban centres by
2025. The digital ecosystem will need
to evolve to come to terms with needs
of this emerging demography (Business
Standard 1 ).
Out of the total internet connec-
tions, 61% connections were in urban areas, of which 97% connections were wireless. The
future predictions are more optimistic. A Statista report suggests that even though the inter-
net penetration in urban India is over two times than rural areas, the usership in rural areas has
been growing at a faster rate on a year-on-year basis. ”While internet users grew by 4 per cent in
1
Business Standard, 3 June 2021, https://www.business-standard.com/article/technology/
active-internet-users-in-india-likely-to-reach-900-mn-by-2025-iamai-121060300710_1.html

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FIGURE 1: SMARTPHONE USERS OVER TIME

urban India – reaching 323 million users (67 per cent of urban population) in 2020, digital adoption
continues to be propelled by rural India clocking a 13 per cent growth to 299 million internet users
(31 per cent of rural population) over the past year,” the report said. Furthermore, small towns
account for
6 warnings almost two out of five active internet users (AIU).

Smartphone Use Smartphone shipments in India increased by 23% YoY to reach 38 mil-
lion units in the first quarter of 2021, driven by new product launches and delayed demand
from 2020. Xiaomi led the Indian smartphone market with 26% shipping, followed by Sam-
sung (20%). India stood third (4.6 hours a day) on the list of average time spent by an average
user on smartphones, with Indonesia (5.2 hours a day) and Brazil (4.8 hours a day) taking the
top two spots worldwide.
With COVID-19-induced lockdowns, sale of smartphones through online channels increased
in 2020. During the festive season (Diwali), footfalls in physical stores picked up and offline
channels clocked a 5% YoY growth in the fourth quarter of 2020. According to a report by
Statista (Image above) 2 the number of smartphone users in India is expected to rise exponen-
tially in recent future owing to untapped potential in the rural parts of the country.
As said previously, internet penetration and widespread use of smartphones forms the foun-
dation for the e-commerce business to flourish. It is no surprise that, owing to the rise in inter-
net and smartphone usage the e-commerce sector shows optimistic signs in terms of growth
2
(Image Source: Statista https://www.statista.com/statistics/467163/
forecast-of-smartphone-users-in-india/ )

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and customer acquisition and retention. Next, we will give a brief overview of the current state
and future projections for E-commerce business in India.

1.2 E-COMMERCE: MARKET SIZE

India e-commerce sector will reach US$99
billion by 2024 from US$30 billion in
2019, expanding at a 27% CAGR, with
grocery and fashion/apparel likely to be
the key drivers of incremental growth.
Online penetration of retail is expected
to reach 10.7% by 2024 compared with
4.7% in 2019. Moreover, online shop-
pers in India are expected to reach
220 million by 2025. As most Indians
have started shopping online rather than
stepping outside their houses, the Indian e-commerce sector witnessed an increase. According
to Forrester Research, Indian e-commerce sales rose by 7-8% in 2020.
India’s e-commerce festive sale season
The Indian online grocery market is esti- from October 15 to November 15 in 2020
mated to reach US$ 18.2 billion in 2024 recorded Rs. 58,000 crore (US$ 8.3 billion)
from US $1.9 billion in 2019, expanding at worth of gross sales for brands and sellers,
a CAGR of 57%. up 65% from Rs. 35,000 crore (US$ 5 bil-
lion) last year. The Indian e-commerce sector
is ranked 9th in cross-border growth in the
world, according to Payoneer report. Indian e-commerce is projected to increase from 4% of
the total food and grocery, apparel and consumer electronics retail trade in 2020 to 8% by
2025. The e-commerce market is expected to touch the US$ 84-billion mark in 2021 on the
back of healthy growth in the Indian organised retail sector.
The Indian online grocery market is
estimated to reach US$ 18.2 billion in
2024 from US $1.9 billion in 2019, ex-
panding at a CAGR of 57%. India’s e-
commerce orders volume increased by
36% in the last quarter of 2020, with
the personal care, beauty and wellness
(PCB&W) segment being the largest
beneficiary. India’s consumer digital
economy is expected to become a US$ 800 billion market by 2030, growing from US$ 537.5

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billion in 2020, driven by strong adoption of online services such as e-commerce and edtech in
the country.
The trend of increasing online sale is expected to continue every year from 2022, driven by
improved digital infrastructure, surging internet usage and rising acceptance of e-commerce.
Following the government curbs on social distancing and lockdown, there was a 39% rise in the
average time spent by an Indian user on a smartphone.
According to Bain & Company report, India’s social commerce gross merchandise value
(GMV) stood at US$ 2 billion in 2020. By 2025, it is expected to reach US$ 20 billion, with
a potentially monumental jump to US$ 70 billion by 2030, owing to high mobile usage. Driven
by beauty and personal care (BPC), India’s live commerce market is expected to reach a gross
merchandise value (GMV) of US$ 4-5 billion by 2025.
The Government of India’s policies and regulatory frameworks such as 100% Foreign Di-
rect Investment (FDI) in B2B E-commerce and 100% FDI under automatic route under the
marketplace model of B2C E-commerce are expected to further propel growth in the sector. As
per the new FDI policy, online entities through foreign investment cannot offer the products
which are sold by retailers in which they hold equity stake.

1.3 LATEST ACTIVITIES

1.3.1 CORPORATE

Huge investments from global players such as Facebook, which is investing in Reliance Jio are
being recorded in the e-commerce market. Google also reported its first investment worth US$
4.5 billion in Jio Platforms. This deal was followed by the purchase of Future Group by Reliance
Retail, expanding the presence of the Ambani Group in the e-commerce space. Much of the
growth in the industry has been triggered by increasing internet and smartphone penetration.
Reliance is looking at using a hub and spoke model for JioMart, where it will look at managing
both the kirana chain as well as customer order fulfilment. Through this model, the Reliance
warehouse would act as a centralised hub and goods would travel outward to smaller locations
(kiranas) for distribution.
In July 2021, e-commerce conglomerate Amazon opened its first Digital Kendra in Surat,
Gujarat. Amazon’s Digital Kendras are physical resource centres for micro, small and medium-
sized businesses (MSMEs) to learn about the advantages of e- commerce. In May 2021, Flip-
kart strengthened its grocery infrastructure to cater to customer safety and demand across
India. In this quarter, it is planning to further expand its fulfilment center capacity for grocery
by over 8 lakh square feet across Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Coimbatore and Hyderabad.
Indian language conversational AI technology gathered momentum rather late. It is not a
secret that now these companies are betting high on Indian language technologies to provide
their users a rich experience. Large corporations like Amazon and Google have used regional

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languages as the central theme in their recent marketing campaign to advertise their products.
Google is leading the innovation in developing Indian language technology with extensive re-
search and speech-to-text application for more than 9 Indian languages. Amazon’s flagship
voice system Alexa now supports Indian-English and Hindi; and further plans to support Tamil,
Telugu and Kannada to reach its potential customer base of 200 million who speak these lan-
guages. Recently Microsoft added two Indian languages namely Indian English and Hindi to its
neutral TTS service. Entertainment giant Netflix also recently rolled out its platform support
for Hindi. This includes video synopses, search and so on. Voice search in Indian languages and
many more innovative technologies are on the horizon.

1.3.2 GOVERNMENTS

As of June 25, 2021, the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) portal served 6.87 million orders
worth Rs.116,291 crore (US$ 15.67 billion) from 2.0 million registered sellers and service providers
for 52,651 government buyers. Through its Digital India campaign, the Government of India is
aiming to create a trillion-dollar online economy by 2025. It has formed a new steering com-
mittee that will look after the development of a government-based e-commerce platform. The
new committee, set up by the Commerce Ministry, will provide oversight on the policy for the
Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), which is an e-commerce platform that the gov-
ernment is backing for the development. The ONDC will serve as the infrastructure for setting
up the final storefront, which will be similar to Flipkart and Amazon. In June 2021, Flipkart an-
nounced its partnership with the Telangana government to deploy drones to deliver medical
supplies in remote areas amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Governments are also providing financial support to promote the research in conversa-
tional AI. Central government as well as many state governments have recently awarded project
grants, provided funds towards development of language technologies. Technology develop-
ment for Indian languages (TDIL) along with various IITs and private startups have been in-
volved in creating an ecosystem to develop machine translation, automatic speech recogni-
tion, text-to-speech, optical character recognition, handwriting recognition, etc., for Indian
languages. They are involved in developing open-source datasets as well as technologies to
promote the use of Indian languages in internet. Bahubhashak, National strategy for AI, India
AI are few of the recent projects and initiatives started by the central government.

1.3.3 STARTUPS

A comprehensive list of some of the recent startups backed by high-profile investors is given in
Table 1. Most of these startups initially started with Google’s voice and language services and
later developed their own technologies upon raising sufficient funds.
The general trend is supportive of massive growth opportunities in many business segments
which a traditional approach, limited to a few languages such as English, accented-English and

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Startup Funding Domain Business Specialization

Reverie Reliance Jio E-commerce, BFSI, Education Translation APIs, Voice querying
Gnani.AI Samsung BFSI, FMCG, Healthcare Call centre automation
Saarthi.AI Lead Angels Network E-commerce, BFSI, Healthcare Call centre automation
SlangLabs Endiya Partners E-commerce Voice support for Apps
Rezo.AI Modulor Capital E-commerce, Logistics, Automobile Process automation through WhatsApp
CoRover.AI CanBank venture Banking, HR Call centre automation

TABLE 1: STARTUPS DEVELOPING INDIAN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY TOOLS

Hindi and a few applications such as chatbots, TTS and NLP, is inadequate to support. Most of
the startups in this space either provide value-added-service to businesses to reach new cus-
tomers or introduce automation in customer interactions. These demand-driven services are
targeted to ensure cost reduction for businesses and expand the reach but are largely inad-
equate in generating richer personalized user experience and lead generation leading to cus-
tomer satisfaction/retention. We are amongst the first startup that are committed to create
an ecosystem around speech technology where each components in the ecosystem interacts
with others for data, feedback and performance improvement.

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2 TIER II+ CITIES AND E-COMMERCE

E-commerce companies are increasingly focusing on Tier II and Tier III cities since 2018. As, the
demographic landscape and pocket spends of these cities are constantly evolving, the revenue
share of Tier II+ cities has been growing and with digital marketing efforts can be targeted di-
rectly to these potential customers. This year’s festive season recorded 88% customer growth
from last year, which was mainly driven by about 40 million shoppers from Tier II+ cities 3 .

2.1 ADVANTAGE TIER II+

• Majority of new-to-internet consumers are from Tier II+ cities.

• Untapped market with no loyalty base and preconceived biases; a level playing field for
emerging e-commerce businesses.

• The revenue share of Tier II+ cities has been growing and digital marketing efforts can be
targeted directly to these potential customers.

A 2019 Redseer survey 4 on 3000 consumers in 121 cities throughout India suggests that
there is a tremendous growth opportunities when it comes to online spending. Around 210
million internet users prefer digital content in vernacular. An Yourstory 5 article supports this
finding and further claims that vernacular content creation is the key to digital advertisement
to monetize the Tier II+ consumers by turning them to digital platforms. This user base can be
3
IBEF report https://www.ibef.org/industry/ecommerce.aspx
4
Redseer https://redseer.com/newsletters/vernacular-is-now-not-the-future-a-300-bn-opportunity-today/
5
yourstory https://yourstory.com/2020/09/advertising-vernacular-content-tier-two-three-markets/
amp

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targeted for vernacular ad spend and online purchasing. Starting with the electronic, apparel
and beauty product, the e-commerce is ready to embark into areas such as online grocery shop-
ping, local product purchase, online food delivery and so on.

2.2 VERNACULAR USERS

Though these vernacular users prefer
content in local languages there are
many gaps in these studies. For starters,
vernacular content consumption may
not translate into e-commerce transac-
tions. Though these users prefer news,
videos and advertisements in their local
languages this does not imply that they
are willing to engage in online purchase,
if offered in vernacular. Many factors
such as history of online engagement,
ease of engagement, preconceived no-
tions and rumors about shopping online
play major role in determining the consumer confidence in the e-commerce businesses. First
we point out studies which show that there is indeed a large consumer base which is willing to
adopt to e-commerce when services are offered in vernacular languages. 6
According to a report by Bain & Company 7 , Voice and vernacular are core to attracting the next
6
Yourstory https://yourstory.com/2020/07/india-vernacular-content-audio-apps-next-billion-users/
amp
7
Bain and Company https://www.bain.com/insights/how-india-shops-online-2021/

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generation of consumers. Use of voice-assistant apps doubled to approximately 5–6 million monthly
users in 2021 (average until May). Web pages were translated to vernacular languages approximately
50% more in 2020 compared with 2019. Use of vernacular-language apps such as ShareChat and
Daily Hunt continued to accelerate through the pandemic.
Another report by Bain & Company 8 shows that the total number of monetizable vernac-
ular users will increase to around 340 million by 2023. Furthermore, thanks to multiple online
payment platforms such as PayTM, Google Pay etc. the online purchase has become hassle
free.

1 in 10 platform users adopt voice search, and 1 in 3 new e-retail users visit through a vernacular
platform interface. Voice and vernacular searches will increasingly become mainstream.
Bain and Company Report

There are many reasons why most of these users are currently reluctant to purchase online.
These reasons include lack of trust, complicated and unfamiliar interface and unfavourable
perceptions and lack of local language support. The same report points out that about 23%
of the users who did not purchase products online cite unavailability of local language support
as one of the reasons for their choice of doing so. The above mentioned factors are interrelated
8
Bain and Company https://realtynxt.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/
Future-Of-Commerce-Report-PDF-1.pdf

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and affect each other. For instance, a voice search in vernacular language with local language
interface will be important in gaining the trust and with time the hesitancy will vanish. We be-
lieve that a friendlier interface and easy catalogue search will convert most of these users to
regular online purchase.

2.3 LOCAL BUSINESSES

The growth of e-commerce in Tier II+ cities affects not only the consumers but also positively
impacts the local businesses. With a detailed consumer data analysis at hand, these local busi-
nesses can reinvent themselves to catch up with consumer demands and current trends.
Many local vendors believe that the e-commerce platform in their preferred language will
improve their reach connecting their inventory with the customers and hence help their busi-
ness grow. With direct access to market, these businesses will be able to focus on production

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quality without worrying about advertisement, customer acquisition and reach and so on. The
vernacular support will surely help them increase their customer base and hence sales.

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3 VOICE AS A SERVICE (VAAS)

The main purpose of a voice recognition system is to convert a given voice signal to its corre-
sponding orthographic text which will then be used by the subsequent NLP systems.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) A good speech recognition system should be robust
to channel, speaker, age, gender, environment, noise and recording device variations present
in the voice.

• Increasing the amount of training data, typically in the order of thousands of hours.

• Improving the quality of the ground truth data (a.k.a the audio transcriptions).

• Diversifying the nature of the training data with respect to the speaker’s age, gender,
accent and dialect regions.

• Improving the complexity, architecture and training duration of the ML models.

• Handling the morphological complexity and effective vocabulary building for the lan-
guages.

Text-to-speech systems Text-to-speech (TTS) is an alternative assistive technology that al-

lows end users to consume contents that a business provides online. It enables the content to
be audible so that a larger pool of users have personalized and humane experience. This tech-
nology will primarily benefit the semi-literate Indian users who can now seamlessly access the
application without any difficulties. Further, TTS can be thought of as the voice of any business
(e.g. Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa). The voice of a business’ TTS could psychologically bring
instant connection between the user and the business, and so it is important for any business
to have a real-time, high-quality, appealing, human-like synthetic voice that interacts with the
end users. Our startup offers such multi-speaker, high-quality TTS systems that could poten-
tially become the voice of our customers’ businesses.

Natural language processing systems Natural language processing (NLP) systems enable ma-
chines the ability to read, analyze, understand and derive meaning from spoken or written form
of human languages. These systems process the input text from voice recognition system and
identifies the intent, context, name-entities and sentiments to automatically trigger actions.
Such systems can be built efficiently by training on large amount of annotated text data. Our
product offerings include NLP systems that can be used to build chatbot, appointment booking,
question-answering, sales lead generation, bill payments, request processing, etc. We will de-
velop the NLP modules taking into account the complex morphological structure of the Indian
languages.

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Chatbot systems Chatbot represents the natural evolution of a question-answering system

leveraging various NLP modules. The complexity of a chatbot varies from a simple plug-and-
play question-answering system to dynamic state machine knowledge graph-based systems.
According to the nature of the clients’ businesses, these chatbots will be developed to specifi-
cally cater to their needs.
The output from the chatbot system is passed through the content resource management
(CRM) systems which executes a series of actions and its responses are played back to the end-
user via TTS. In this new era of AI, chatbots can be considered as an effective replacement to
highly human-intensive call centre operations where tasks can be automatically performed
with predefined templates and workflows. Our business solution based on chatbot includes
question-answering, ticket raising based on complaints, customer care and integration of these
service through messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram.

Vernacular, Voice and Video will emerge as the game changers for the digital ecosystem over the
next few years.
Biswapriya Bhattacharjee, Executive Vice President, Insights Division, Kantar

Advantage of going vernacular Spoken language can be broadly classified as vernacular or

colloquial. Vernacular refers to the language or dialect spoken by people that are inhabiting
a particular region. It is typically the native language, normally spoken informally rather than
written, and seen as of lower status than more codified forms. Colloquialism is the form of
language that speakers typically use when they are relaxed and not especially self-conscious.
As digital awareness is rising even in the remote parts of the country, it is high time to design the
web that supports various regional/vernacular languages that supports colloquialism as well.
In the last decade, there has been a growing trend to publish the contents in regional lan-
guages, yet most of the business application use only English which creates a huge cultural
divide and limited accessibility. The main advantage of our business is that it not develops
cutting-edge AI and ML tools, but also brings internet inclusiveness by addressing the chal-
lenges of language diversity in our country.

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4 STORIES

4.1 AMAZON
For the first time in a major online sale, customers experienced the Amazon Great Indian Fes-
tival in regional languages: Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. Apart from this ver-
nacular push, Amazon is also powering up it’s app with Alexa, it’s homegrown Voice Assistant
that can invoke searches and specific actions in the app. In the run up to the Great Indian Festi-
val, Alexa answered over 100K requests from customers on the Amazon shopping app to help
navigate to their favourite stores such as the SMB Store, the Great Indian Bazaar, deals, gifting
store and the Fun Zone. On the Amazon Shopping app, Alexa received its highest single day
requests of over 1 million to guide customers to their product searches, best deals, bill pay-
ments, music and much more during Prime Exclusive Access. To get more users to engage and
try their Alexa Voice Assistant in India, Amazon even announced roping in Amitabh Bacchan
as the voice of Alexa in India! This illustrates the seriousness with which Voice is being consid-
ered inside Amazon for Indian market and also the kind of no-holds-barred investments that
are being made in the same.

4.2 FLIPKART
Introduced in Flipkart’s grocery store, ’Supermart’, the Voice Assistant will enable consumers
to discover and buy products using voice commands in multiple languages, starting with Hindi
and English.
The voice-first conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform has been built by Flip-
kart’s in-house technology team with solutions for speech recognition, natural language un-
derstanding, machine translation, and text to speech for Indian languages, a statement said 9 .

9
Read more at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/newsbuzz/
flipkarts-voice-assistant-to-help-people-shop-for-grocery/articleshow/76282759.cms?utm_
source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

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5 INDIASPEAKS
IndiaSpeaks Research Labs is a technology based B2B service provider that provides voice-
based solutions to enhance regional customer base in India. We provide voice-first mode of
interaction to the end users so that they can navigate through the mobile or computer appli-
cation and purchase products using voice commands. We provide these solutions for Indian
languages along with English so that semi-literate users from the huge untapped rural market
can be easily reached by the businesses.
Our focus lies in development and customization of Indian language voice-based chatbot
services for various businesses. These services can be effectively deployed in their customer
care call centres so as to avoid (i) long waiting time, (ii) frustrating experience, and (iii) overhead
task on the call centre executives.
Our solutions and services mainly utilize our indigenous voice recognition, text-to-speech
and natural language processing systems carefully designed for Indian languages. These solu-
tions will fill a major gap in the current product offerings of the businesses. Our services can
be easily adopted by businesses across several verticals: (i) E-commerce, (ii) BFSI, (iii) Travel &
hospitality, (iv) Media & entertainment, (v) Automobiles, (vi) Payment interfaces, etc.

Business objectives In order for our business venture to sustain and grow, the business needs
to work on the following objectives:

• Developing language technology tools for all the spoken languages of India.

• Building a large speech and text data corpus for Indian languages covering different ge-
ographical locations and dialects.

• Developing high-quality voice technology solutions by partnering with the research com-
munity.

• Automating the intents from content resource management (CRM) resources to make
voice-first interaction for the product so that ease of doing business is improved.

• Penetrate 5% of the e-commerce business sector by the end of 5th year.

• Create future business plans for providing our voice services directly to the end users
rather through other businesses.

• Achieve a sales revenue of Rs. 30 crores and net profit of Rs. 10 crores by the end of 3rd
year.

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Business solutions Our startup primarily offers the following two solutions to businesses
across various domains in all Indian languages:
(1) End-to-end “Voice-first” interface: Voice-first is a whole new interfacing technology which
uses voice recognition, TTS and NLP systems that allow users to interact with the applica-
tion by just speaking (which is the most natural form of communication) rather by typing. This
makes the technology more accessible to users across the board, not just senior adults and peo-
ple with disabilities. Since the voice-First technology uses AI at the back-end, the system will
remember the context according to the user’s prior conversations thus offering personalized
experience to them. We will try to provide an ideal voice-first interface to our clients’ busi-
nesses so that all the features and capabilities in their mobile/web application can be accessed
through voice commands.

(2) Automation of customer care call centres: In the traditional process, the users are re-
quested to contact the respective business customer care, business process outsourcing units
or interactive voice response systems through telephone to raise complaints or queries. The
main concerns of this approach are (i) choosing the right option in IVR by listening to all the
available options, (ii) longer waiting time for the calls to be answered, (iii) overloaded calls to
the customer care executives, etc. Automation of call centres (ACC) is designed to solve all
the pain points discussed above with the help of state-of-art core technologies such as voice
recognition, TTS and NLP by integrating these components based on a predefined workflow.
The end customers can interact with these automated systems and resolve their issues with
lesser waiting time and get better experience, thus making the entire process more efficient.
Further, it makes the system and user interaction more realistic and natural.

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 October 20, 2021

6 INSIGHTS & DISCUSSION

India contributes around half of the next one billion potential users of e-commerce. Most of
these users come from Tier II+ cities. The government as well as e-commerce giants are taking
major steps to appeal to this customer base. Supportive government policies, growth of new
startups, new collaborations and mergers/acquisitions to better suit the needs of these clients
are but a few positive signs indicating current activities in this space. The use of e-commerce
in electronics purchase, beauty products and fashion is already catching up among these users.
The next phase of this revolution includes Grocery/FMCG products, local products and furni-
ture and others. All of the current reports and market analysis point to immediate need to in-
clude vernacular support to gain more confidence among Tier II+ users. IndiaSpeaks provides
these state of the art products at scale.

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