Hyderabad: Slang Labs, an In-App Voice Assistant company that offers Voice Assistant as a Service (VAaaS), is seeing a lot of potential to cater to companies in Hyderabad across verticals. The company has already partnered with the city-based Kisanwala, which provides agritech solutions for farmers. Talks are also in progress with several other companies in retail, e-commerce and other sectors.
The company which was backed by the Hyderabad-based venture capital firm Endiya Partners, raising $1.2 million in 2018, recently received an investment from the Google Assistant Investments programme, along with 100x Entrepreneurs, Velu Murugan, Thomas George and Endiya Partners. The company became one of the first players in the In-App Voice Assistant space globally to be backed by Google.
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In-App Voice Assistant is a promising touchpoint for e-commerce and other interactions online. Through the company’s technology, consumers can do online transactions in their apps through their voice, and in their preferred language-English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam now and Telugu very soon.
Kumar Rangarajan, co-founder, Slang Labs, told Telangana Today, “We have seen good adoption in e-commerce particularly driven by the demand from tier 2 and tier 3 markets, travel sector that has constantly gone online, job or employee onboarding market, and the BFSI sectors. We are tapping all these four major domains. We are also seeing opportunities in e-pharmacy and tele-health, but these sectors will take time to evolve.”
Slang Labs’ delivery model reduces the time-to-market by up to 90 per cent for brands to embed a highly accurate, multilingual voice assistant inside their mobile and web apps. Voice assistants have been integrated with apps of P&G, Udaan, BigBasket, Redbus, Shine and SpiceJet. The company offers both pay per use and flat charge model based on predicted volumes. Going forward, the company is planning to foray into global markets such as the US and South Asia.
Use cases
Rangarajan said, “We have seen five broad use cases where voice assistants are playing a key role. These include voice search on ecommerce platforms, navigation to access different functionalities on sites, voice forms where basic information of customers are collected, voice promotion where a brand wants to promote something or introduce an offer, and voice actions.”
When asked how the company has addressed serving the needs of those who have hearing disability, he said, “We use voice augmented technology where the visual/text gets displayed so that the communication is not merely voice based.”
New features
Slang Labs through its field research has been constantly understanding market needs and integrating new features into the product such as custom voice solution and low code assistant. “We are also now working on a solution where there is no need for a code. This ‘no code’ platform is going to be a niche offering in the segment,” he added.
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