NLP and AI in general are advancing at breakneck speeds, and models in the recent years have shown the real power of deep learning in capturing the nuances of language. Well, a few high resources languages and demographics, really. However, not everyone in the world speaks those languages, and generalizing to other languages is not a trivial task at all.

While my fellow netizens have surely focused on other demographics, today I want to focus on the rather timely Indian AI/NLP story. The past 5 years have been an astounding journey for Indian internet, as cheap data rates and widespread smartphone usage have led to some really unexpected phenomena. Earlier this year, the number of rural internet users overtook the number of urban internet users, which is fascinating given the huge infrastructural divide between rural and urban India.

And the new netizens ain’t no English speakers: 90% of new internet users are using Indian languages, not English. And we aren’t talking about just 1 or 2 Indian languages, we are talking roughly a dozen major languages that figure in the top 40 languages in the world by number of native speakers.

Enter Flipkart, a decade-old company that has been disrupting the Indian retail space and all its strata, right from the tier 1 cities down to tier 2 and 3. Not to mention its rival Amazon that is competing fiercely. In this article, I am going to describe highlights from a recent event hosted by Flipkart where they talked about business and technical aspects regarding what it takes to woo the next 200 million users in India, a lot of whom use Indian languages like Hindi, Tamil, etc. A lot of them (myself included) hate typing and would much rather use a voice interface to interact with the online Flipkart platform.

Let’s begin. There were 7 speakers in all, and I liked their mix of technical and business abilities. Most of them have led divisions within big companies and/or startups, so it seems these guys are slated to succeed. I will summarize the highlights of each talk based on the notes I took.

#nlp #next-billion-users #flipkart #machine-translation #data-science #ai