India is a particularly interesting market where local startups are winning agains their larger Western competitors

Whilst Facebook and Google are occupied with the very real issues of censorship (and Amazon works to match the ambition of their global roll-out with in-market success), smaller companies are making a larger social impact right under their noses.

Thought leaders within digitally mature economies have long cited voice as a proponent (and enabler) of changing consumer behaviour (h/t to Siri and Alexa), but the true potential of AI and voice technology feels untapped by Silicon Valley. Regional/local players have stolen a march on Silicon Valley by working to bridge the gap faster and improve Internet access/literacy in developing economies and digitally mature regions.

Few regions have shifted to adopt and implement AI technology as widely as India. The conditions created by the ruling BJP party have allowed Indian tech companies to flourish – albeit at the expense of creating tension with international trading partners. This new confidence in regulating tech spaces has created a walled garden around India’s economy; allowing local players to flourish whilst their global competitors restructure and reshuffle to comply with new policies/regulations.

Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) in particular has relished the opportunity of bringing the fight to Big Tech on home turf. India’s richest man has used his USD 54.8bn fortune to make multiple acquisitions across voice, AI and logistics to build a platform capable of challenging the status quo. The move makes strategic sense – India’s e-commerce appetite is second only to China and, in a country where organised retail is still a rarity, the opportunity is too big to ignore.

Flipkart has responded to the topography of the Indian market by doubling down on its investments within the fields of AI and machine learning. AIForIndia, a sub-division personally championed by group chairman Sachin Bansal, is set up to introduce ‘intelligence at scale’, according to the tagline used at Flipkart’s annual developer conference. Translating business problems to mathematical equations (and solutions to these equations).

The ambition from the Indian decision makers is to use AI/machine learning to tackle bigger problems than order fraud and abandoned carts. A strategy document published by government think tank NITI Aayog in June 2018 outlines an ambitious blueprint for the AI in India – one where precision farming unlocks efficiencies within agriculture and machine learning models improve congestion on motorways and railroads. Add to this manifesto Bolo, a learning app powered by Google’s voice recognition technology, and India’s tech-enabled future seems bright.

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4,257 miles away in Denmark, AI technology is being primed to foster inclusivity in different ways. In a world where female voices occupy the assistant space and male voices issue commands at subway stations and road crossings, Q, the genderless voice assistant first previewed at SXSW last month, makes a statement.

Created as a collaboration between Virtue Nordic and Copenhagen Pride, Q approaches the challenge of traditional bias and gender cues with a simple solution: a heavily modified voice, vetted by thousands of survey participants, that sits within the 145Hz – 175Hz gender-neutral range. As Amazon and Google prepare voice activated enterprise solutions, Q could be a great step towards erasing old stereotypes of secretary typing pools and dispelling workplace discrimination for good.

These contrasting examples show now things could be done. Put AI/voice in the hands of the right people (and in the right devices), and the opportunities to enable and educate are almost endless.

Virtual assistants are already equipped with the capability to help us schedule meetings, set reminders and answer our questions faster. Chatbots have been busy filling the void of cheap call centre labour for years. So why is it that Silicon Valley has been so slow to support developing markets with tech solutions to their problems?

Naysayers may point to the fact that voice search and virtual assistants is powered by the potential for ROI. Valid point, but educational services (like Google India’s Bolo app) should be the first stage of a long term investment strategy for all new markets. Why? Because this type of technology offers companies the opportunity to harvest a resource worth its weight in gold: user data.

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What emerging markets lack in traditional infrastructure, they make up for in device penetration. Around a third of all African mobile users have smartphones, and Asia leads the way in mobile-first access to the Internet – phones have replaced the desktop computer as the milieu for Internet access in communities where you’d be hard pressed to find a tarmac road or reliable running water. And where access to 3G signal goes, smartphones swiftly follow – creating a generation of Internet users who’ve leapfrogged conventional computers to go straight to mobile.

Combined with a global influx of ‘smart’, cheap to assemble devices, consumer electronics have built the foundations for change in many developing economies (the same technology reducing everyday ‘friction’ for affluent consumers could help register a citizen to vote or find a doctor in their area).

With the right commercial outlook, the long term benefits of this strategy to providers are obvious. Get people using you technology, create a known audience and market to them through that same technology using the customer data you just harvested.

Platforms like Duo Lingo may offer an example of how to execute based on this premise. The language learning platform offers free at point of use language education by crowd-sourcing translations for large sites, who in turn translate sections of their site from English as part of its online curriculum, and offers additional monetisation of users through targeted ads. The app’s scope has since expanded to offer a teaching certificate (at a pricepoint that significantly undercuts more established competitors) and an ad-free subscription model – offering onlookers an insight as to how to adapt to a ‘freemium’ approach in order to accommodate a business model shifting to cater for customers from all socio-economic backgrounds.

With AI/voice becoming more and more intuitive, the stage is set for developing economies to benefit from the technology making our own paths to purchase faster. Market conditions (high smartphone penetration, low access to desktop devices) are ideal, but questions linger over the incentive being presented to developers to harness this potential. Now, with tangible examples of how it can be used to its full potential under its belt, AI and voice look set to fulfil their status as Next Big Thing.
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Photo by Piotr Cichosz on Unsplash

 

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