The Bengaluru-based e-commerce startup, which serves 160 million customers in India, said Tuesday its AI bot currently handles 60,000 customer calls daily in English and Hindi. The startup, which also counts Prosus and Elevation among its backers, plans to add support for six more Indian languages. Rather than developing its own large language model, Meesho has for now combined existing AI large language models with custom-built components that understand local context and language nuances. The system includes specialized building blocks for speech recognition and natural language processing. 'We haven't built our own LLM because we believe the off-the-shelf ones available out there were doing well in Hindi and English,' said Sanjeev Barnwal, co-founder and chief technology officer of Meesho, in an interview with TechCrunch. The system had to overcome several technical hurdles, he showed TechCrunch in a demo. 'Voice quality matters a lot. Many users are on low-end smartphones and...
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