Swiggy partners with IndiVillage for data annotation exercise to accelerate its AI-first vision

Swiggy, India’s leading on-demand delivery platform has partnered with IndiVillage to 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. When call centre service executives move from one call to another, there is a need to efficiently extract information from the call data to understand the ‘voice of the customers’ to enable a deeper understanding of the issues faced by customers and accordingly solve for the same. 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.

“As a tech-first organisation, 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 customised processes tuned to meet Swiggy’s unique needs” says Hemant Misra, VP & Head of Applied Research, Swiggy.

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. As a leader in the on-demand delivery space, Swiggy is at the forefront of innovation and customer experience. This journey is one that we are proud to partner. 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. I am excited about the road ahead and look forward to a long-term association with India’s leading on-demand delivery platform,” states IndiVillage CEO, Smita Malipatil.

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