In a post-FlipMart ecosystem, it may revolutionise businesses and interactive, e-commerce-based consumer experience, especially for customers without computer or knowledge of English, and the vast majority of those speaking only Indian languages.
The citizens of Bharat could now make just one call to get connected with the startup Niki.ai for a chat-and-shop experience for products and services, ranging from a phone recharge to a flight ticket, thanks to the Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based speech recognition and multilingual support being introduced next month by India’s pioneer conversational e-commerce platform, funded by, among others, Ratan Tata and Ronnie Screwvala.
The 2015-founded startup is launching voice recognition service in Hindi language in June, to be followed by a gradual rollout in other regional languages like Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali and Marathi by December 2018.
“We had started a pilot project in April 2017 to integrate voice recognition with multilingual services and the rollout begins in June,” Sachin Jaiswal, CEO, Niki.ai, told BusinessLine .
Stock-broking, insurance services
The company also plans to introduce stock-broking and insurance services soon on the same platform.
One will soon be able to simply talk to Niki.ai to get the tasks done in an Indian language. No learning curve, no fields, no buttons and no endless navigations on search engines. It is a digital, chat-based, AI-powered shopping assistant to anyone having a mobile phone, and knowing only his/her regional language. “Even an auto-rickshaw driver or vegetable seller can get the product and services simply by calling us in his/her language,” he said.
Holds immense potential
The potential is immense. No wonder, marquee investors-funded Niki.ai clocked a 430 per cent revenue growth in FY18, with two million users. With the new services on offer, it is targeting a 25 million-strong user base by March 2019, with $120 million (nearly Rs 800 crore) worth of gross merchandise value (GMV), Jaiswal said.
Niki.ai is currently available on iOS, Android, Facebook and Web platforms. With more partnerships in line, the startup aims to be ubiquitous, present everywhere and for everything transactional, he said.
The firm has seen an 800 per cent year-on-year growth in GMV, and 56 per cent month-on-month growth in transactions resulting in a revenue growth of 430 per cent.
This, he said, is an indicator of the larger impact AI-based products can have on the consumers who find great convenience and value in the selected product.
Online shopping
The younger, tech-savvy generation loves the convenience of online shopping. Conversations have been an integral part of traditional, interactive shopping, and despite the shift, the average online shopper looks for contextual and proactive communication while transacting online.
AI-based conversational UI platforms
In order to meet consumer expectations, businesses are switching from conventional user-interface (UI) platforms to AI-based conversational UI platforms. In other words, Niki.ai integrates e-commerce with interactive shopping and experience in the consumer’s own language, via AI-based speech recognition.
Niki.ai, Jaiswal said, credits for this overwhelming traction to distribution partnerships of over 60 firms, including leading brands like HDFC Bank, HDFC Securities, ICICI Bank, Federal Bank, Karbonn Mobiles, and Intex Smartphones, Oxigen Vallet and Earlysalary, which integrated Niki.ai’s Software Developments Kit (SDK) to offer utility services like bus, hotel, cab, movie booking, bill payments, recharges etc on chat, with Niki.ai being present on their own platforms.
Niki.ai’s conversational interface remembers customer context and offers an immersive, natural, personalised and unique experience to every customer.
Owing to this, and a study’s findings that conversational UIs are habit-forming, Niki.ai has achieved high retention and repeat customer rates. The company has witnessed a 1.7 times boost in the average order size, even as the average number of orders placed by users shot up to 7 per month during FY18, Jaiswal said.
The platform provides a conversational tool, a simple and easy-to-use chat interface, and gives control to the user rather than dictating how and what of the product experience.
“With millions of interactions, we’ve been able to strengthen our natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) capabilities, making the text recognition accuracy reach above 92%.”
The start-up’s product is an AI-based chatbot which works as an intelligent personal assistant, named Niki. It leverages NLP and ML, presenting a chat-based natural language UI to the users for interacting with Niki in their own language.
Niki, aware of how users chat in India, then deciphers the words, in the context of product or services they would like to purchase. It also comes up with recommendations for the consumer.
Plug-and-play technology
While Niki.ai makes it easy for individuals to shop for products and services, it also provides a plug-and-play technology to the businesses in the form of Niki SDK that can be integrated anywhere, including operating systems, messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, and on the brand’s applications (Android, iOS and web).
Conceived in Udaipur, Rajasthan, by four friends from IIT-Kharagpur — achin Jaiswal, Keshav Prawasi, Shishir Modi and Nitin Babel — over a round of beer in 2015, Niki.ai was nurtured in Bengaluru. It was subsequently backed by investors like Ratan Tata, Ronnie Screwvala, Unilazer Ventures and SAP.iO, among others.
“We now envision to be a one-stop-shop for everything commerce.”