Online shopping site Meesho, backed by Softbank, rolled out what it claims is the first GenAI-powered voice bot among Indian e-commerce firms for customer support, paring down some expenses by 75%.

GenAI, short for generative AI, refers to artificial intelligence models that are trained on lots of data so that they are capable of producing and parsing content — in this case, the human voice.

Bengaluru-based e-commerce startup Meesho said on Tuesday it handles 60,000 customer calls daily in English and Hindi through an AI bot. It plans to extend its language support to six more Indian languages.

Meesho serves over 160 million customers in India, with 80% of them coming from smaller cities, towns, and villages. The startup, valued at $4.9 billion, handles more than $5 billion a year in sales. Customer service has been of particular interest. "We receive a lot of customer support calls," said Sanjeev Barnwal, co-founder and chief technology officer, in an interview with TechCrunch. "We must get it right to create the best experience for our users," he said.

Rather than building its own large language model (LLM), Meesho has — for now — combined existing LLMs with custom-built components that understand local context and language nuances. The system includes specialist building blocks for speech recognition and natural language processing, according to Barnwal.

"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," he said.

Demonstrating how the system had to overcome several technical hurdles, he showed, "Voice quality matters a lot. Many users are on low-end smartphones and there's often noisy background like buses honking," Barnwal noted, saying the bot had to be engineered to improve latency and filter out street noise while keeping conversations as natural as possible.

He declined to elaborate on the per-call expenses that the AI bot had been able to shrink by 75%. But the e-commerce firm, which recently generated positive cash flow, claims a 95% query resolution rate through the bot, with only 5% of calls requiring human intervention. Customer satisfaction has also improved by 10%, it suggested.

Meesho also said the voice bot reduced its average customer call handling time by half, but the company asserted the technology wasn't aimed at replacing human agents — who it said had been redirected to handle more complex queries and offer seller support.

Another major challenge he mentioned was to ensure that the AI didn't deviate from strict guidelines about policies like returns and refunds.

The launch betrays how Indian tech companies are now in a mad dash to introduce AI to their operations in the pursuit of greater efficiency, while they wonder whether to build proprietary models or rely on existing LLMs.

"We don't have enough talent today to build foundational models," said Hemant Mohapatra, a partner at Lightspeed, at a recent conference. "Play the war that you are capable of winning."