Bangalore, September 10, 2020: Swiggy, India’s leading on-demand delivery platform, has partnered with Indivillageto power solutioning and service delivery for the platform’s broader AI and ML charter. IndiVillage’s engagement with Swiggy, which began in April this year, includes voice annotation work that provides training data for Swiggy’s ML algorithms.
IndiVillage is a BPO and social enterprise using impact sourcing to bring opportunity to rural India and offers cutting-edge solutions in the area of image and data annotation, natural language processing, and content optimization to technology and e-commerce companies.
An essential application of the speech data annotation undertaken by IndiVillage is the development of AI-driven speech recognition models for Swiggy’s call centre process
The process requires labelled data, and IndiVillage supports Swiggy in this regard by annotating dozens of hours of speech data, an exercise made even more complicated due to India’s linguistic diversity, featuring calls in Hindi, English, and ‘Hinglish’.
IndiVillage’s accurate and comprehensive service allowed Swiggy to establish a proof of concept for speech recognition - a development that has the potential to scale the partnership between the two companies.
Commenting on the partnership Hemant Misra, VP & Head of Applied Research, Swiggy, said "As a tech-first organization, our vision is to deliver unparalleled convenience to our consumers, and this is a continuously evolving process. Considering the volume of transactions on the platform, we take an AI-led approach to deliver operations at scale. With tens of thousands of delivery partners serving millions of consumers across the country, the complexity is high, and AI becomes the game-changer. Partnering with firms like IndiVillage accelerates some of our key innovation efforts and the journey so far has been impactful. The team genuinely understands the problem statement in-depth, and customizes processes tuned to meet Swiggy's unique needs".
IndiVillage embraces a purpose-first ‘Business for Good’ model that has seen the company reinvest profits within the community to further education, healthcare, and access to clean drinking water. IndiVillage’s business model pivots around a workforce of 300+ hired from within the rural communities in which its centres operate.
The company’s employees are then taught a wide range of tasks such as data entry, online cataloguing, content management, transcription, image tagging, and content tagging that support innovation in large businesses.
"We are delighted to be partnering with an innovative and impactful leader like Swiggy. The best AI/ML solutions require high quality, organised, secure and unbiased training data that don't compromise the intelligence of the algorithms and we fully believe that our services in this space will accelerate Swiggy’s transformation roadmap. Alongside our extensive data annotation capabilities and experience supporting cutting-edge AI for our clients, our 'Business for Good' mission believes that purpose and profit go hand in hand. Swiggy's confidence in our ability is a testament to the success of our model " said IndiVillage CEO, Smita Malipatil.
In addition to Swiggy, IndiVillage, whose services are delivered out of offices in Yemmiganur, AP, and Raichur, Karnataka, supports some of the world's leading ecommerce and technology companies including Amazon, Appen, Alegion and Mercato, a testament to the firm's quality of service.