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India's Meesho Cuts Customer Call Costs by 75% with GenAI

2024-11-26

Softbank-backed Meesho has made a significant move in the e-commerce space by introducing what it claims to be the first GenAI-powered voice bot among Indian e-commerce firms. This innovative solution aims to enhance customer support while also cutting down expenses by a substantial 75%. GenAI, or generative AI, involves training models on extensive data to generate and parse content, specifically in the form of the human voice.

Revolutionize Customer Support with Meesho's GenAI Voice Bot

Customer Support on a New Level

The Bengaluru-based e-commerce startup, Meesho, which has over 160 million customers in India, with 80% in smaller cities and towns, has been focusing heavily on customer support. Currently, its AI bot handles an impressive 60,000 customer calls daily in English and Hindi. With plans to add support for six more Indian languages, Meesho is expanding its reach. Sanjeev Barnwal, co-founder and chief technology officer, emphasizes the importance of getting customer support right to create the best experience for users. 1: Meesho has chosen to combine existing large language models (LLMs) with custom-built components that understand local context and language nuances. This approach allows them to provide efficient customer support without building their own LLM. As Barnwal explains, the off-the-shelf LLMs available are already performing well in Hindi and English. 2: In a demo, it became evident that the system had to overcome several technical hurdles. Voice quality is crucial as many users have low-end smartphones and are in noisy environments like on busy streets. The bot has been engineered to reduce latency and filter out street noise while maintaining natural-sounding conversations.

Cost Savings and Query Resolution

Meesho has achieved significant cost savings through the AI bot. By reducing per-call expenses by 75%, the company is able to allocate resources more efficiently. Additionally, the bot has a remarkable 95% query resolution rate, with only 5% of calls requiring human intervention. This not only saves time but also improves customer satisfaction by 10%. 1: The e-commerce firm, which recently generated positive cash flow, is leveraging this technology to offer round-the-clock customer support. This ensures that customers can get assistance at any time, enhancing their overall shopping experience. 2: Meesho also mentioned that the voice bot has reduced the average customer call handling time by half. This allows the company to handle a larger volume of calls and provide faster responses to customers.

Human Agents and Policy Guidelines

While the AI bot is highly efficient, Meesho is clear that it is not meant to replace human agents. Instead, human agents are redirected to handle more complex queries and offer seller support. Another challenge is ensuring that the AI sticks to strict guidelines about policies like returns and refunds. Meesho is working on maintaining the balance between automation and human interaction to provide the best service. 1: This approach recognizes the value of human expertise in handling certain situations and ensures that customers receive personalized assistance when needed. 2: By combining the capabilities of AI and human agents, Meesho is able to offer a comprehensive customer support system that meets the diverse needs of its customers.The rollout of Meesho's GenAI-powered voice bot highlights India's tech companies' race to deploy AI for increased efficiency. As Hemant Mohapatra from Lightspeed mentioned, building foundational models requires significant talent, and companies are focusing on playing the wars they are capable of winning. Meesho's success with this initiative sets an example for others in the industry.

Now, with the help of a remarkable months-old startup called Pickle, you have the incredible ability to seemingly be on a Zoom call in your office while actually sipping a margarita in a hammock that's far away. The concept is straightforward - submit a five-minute training video of yourself to create an avatar, and within 24 hours, you're good to go. Whether you want to make a call from the comfort of your car or choose to stay in bed when laziness strikes, Pickle has got you covered. However, it's important to note that using the service at a beach club might present some challenges, as evident from the demo video. Currently, the service is available in basic, standard, and pro versions, with prices ranging from $300 to $1,150 per year.

Unlock the Freedom of Virtual Zoom Presence

MacOS and Windows Compatibility

Pickle, backed by the L.A. venture firm Krew Capital, currently only works with macOS. But here's the exciting news - a Windows version is set to be released next month. This means that more users will be able to enjoy the convenience of creating Zoom call avatars on their preferred operating system. While the current focus is on macOS, the team at Pickle is working hard to bring the same seamless experience to Windows users.

With the wide range of conferencing apps available, such as Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, Pickle offers users the flexibility to choose the platform that suits them best. However, it's important to note that the use of these apps with Pickle's service is currently on hold due to high demand. Clone generation is experiencing delays, but the team is dedicated to meeting the needs of their customers and getting the service up and running smoothly as soon as possible.

Versatile Use Cases

The applications of Pickle's Zoom call avatar technology are truly diverse. Imagine being able to attend important business meetings from the comfort of your home while still maintaining a professional appearance. Or perhaps you want to join a family gathering from a remote location without missing out on the fun. Pickle's avatar technology allows you to do just that. It gives you the freedom to be anywhere and still be present in virtual meetings.

Whether you're a busy professional on the go or someone who simply values the convenience of remote communication, Pickle's service offers a unique solution. It eliminates the need to be tied to a specific location and allows you to be flexible with your work and personal life. With Pickle, you can truly have it all.

With the ever-increasing global content consumption and the surpassing demand for non-English content over English movies and shows, IMAX is at the forefront of leveraging AI to scale localization on its original content. The entertainment and media industry witnessed a 5% growth to $2.8 trillion in 2023, as per a report by PwC, and is expected to continue expanding at a modest compound annual growth rate of nearly 4% to reach $3.4 trillion over the next five years. Non-English language content is booming even in English markets like the US, UK, Australia, and Canada. For instance, Netflix reported a 90% growth in its viewership of non-English content in the UK over the last three years.

Partnership with Camb.ai

IMAX has taken these trends into consideration and is now exploring localization using AI to attract more viewers. On Monday, the Canadian production theater company, renowned for its massive theaters and immersive movie experiences, announced its partnership with Dubai-based startup Camb.ai. This partnership aims to utilize Camb.ai's AI speech models for translating original content, including documentaries. Camb.ai has already deployed its AI dubbing and speech translation for various live sports events and leagues such as the Australian Open, Eurovision Sport, and Major League Soccer. It offers its Boli model for speech-to-text translation and Mars for speech emulation, available through its DubStudio platform that supports 140 languages, including low-resource ones.

Camb.ai's co-founder and CTO, Akshat Prakash, who was a former Apple engineer working on AI and ML models for Siri, co-founded the company with his father Avneesh Prakash last year. He emphasized that Camb.ai takes a different approach compared to companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. "They're trying to build very horizontal models that can cover a wide range of tasks. We don't have to do that. Some of our models are less than 100 million parameters and are super specialized," he said. Prakash further explained that Camb.ai pretrained 70% of its models using academic-licensed datasets that are commercially usable, and the remaining 30% involves fine-tuning data from early partners who deploy its models for AI-based dubbing and translation.

He also asserted that Camb.ai is very careful and avoids potentially scraping the internet. "Some companies feel they can get away with it as they build consumer-facing apps or tools. But we don't do that. We have a 'three-layer' approach to provide AI-based translation, comprising the foundation layer of Boli and Mars models, the infrastructure layer hosting these models, and the DubStudio platform for the front end," Prakash said. Camb.ai's Boli takes input speech tokens and produces output text tokens in the translated language while retaining nuances. Once Boli generates the text, Mars translates it into speech using the same audio input signal to capture the actual audio performance, including ambient sounds like the background score of the audience cheering in sports events.

Deployment and Benefits

IMAX will roll out AI translations in stages, starting with high-resource languages. This deployment follows internal testing of Camb.ai's tech on its original content. Mark Welton, president of IMAX Global, said, "While we are only in the beginning stages of the partnership, we will continue to work together to better explore its potential and how it can best move us forward." Welton indicated that the AI deployment will help save on translation costs without disclosing specific details.

Camb.ai currently has a team of 50 people. In February, it raised $4 million in a seed round led by Courtside Ventures. Prakash told TechCrunch that the startup is closing a bigger, pre-Series A round to expand its reach and headcount.