[DeepTech Funding] Slang Labs gets funding from Google Assistant Investments

The In-App Voice Assistants company, Slang Labs announced an investment from the Google Assistant Investments program, along with 100x Entrepreneurs, Velu Murugan, Thomas George and their existing investor Endiya Partners.

With this announcement, Slang Labs becomes one of the first players in the In-App Voice Assistant space globally to be backed by Google. As technology grows more pervasive in people's daily lives due to the ongoing pandemic, In-App Voice Assistant is a promising touchpoint for e-commerce and other interactions online. Through this technology, consumers will be able to do online transactions in their apps through the power of their voice, and in their preferred language.

“We are glad to be part of the Google Assistant Investments program. This investment by Google emphasizes the importance of Voice inside Apps and highlights the most significant technology trend for this decade - Voice. Voice is for this decade, what mobile apps were for the last decade, - the most disruptive and democratizing technology trend that enables millions of businesses and billions of people to transact better online and across multiple domains. We have seen an increase in demand for this technology during the pandemic and will continue innovating for a better consumer interface experience,” said Kumar Rangarajan, Slang Labs Co-Founder.

Apps are how consumers primarily connect and transact with the brands today, and in the foreseeable future. But customers of today and tomorrow (aka the Next Billion Users) have a problem with using apps. They are intimidated by the English-only experience of it. They also face other complexities that come with the rigidity of a touch-only experience like typing on a small keyboard, not knowing how to get to a particular page, spelling mistakes and others.

But for brands, making the app available in multiple languages or simplifying the user experience is a hard, costly and time taking challenge.

Enabling multilingual Voice-based interactions inside their apps, even if the visual language of the app continues to be in English, is an opportunity for businesses to easily solve these problems and quickly reach the 400+million users in tier 2 markets and beyond.

Slang In-App Voice Assistant is the flagship product of Slang Labs helping enterprises make their apps faster, easier and more accessible. The multilingual In-App Voice Assistant gets natively embedded inside the app as a multimodal overlay, allowing its users to transact with the app by just talking to it or by interacting with the visuals of the app directly. More importantly in their own language, even if the app’s visual language continues to be in English. Slang Labs’s unique VAaaS (Voice Assistant as a Service) delivery mechanism allows for the brands to integrate this experience inside their app without having to worry about the overhead of building one from scratch or maintaining them.

Slang In-App Voice Assistant is built to understand the needs of different domains, and easily customizable to suit the requirements of individual apps from that domain. The smart assistant abstracts out all the complex deep tech AI components (like Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Text to speech (TTS), Translations, the dialogue management system) and provides well researched UI/UX components, that work together to provide a delightful end user experience for the users of the app.

While voice user interface has always been popular in internet search and entertainment, the next big leap for voice UI will be in the conversational commerce market. The world is witnessing the rise of voice assistants powered by Artificial Intelligence, increasingly being used across different domains like retail, travel, recruitment and BFSI, and are therefore likely to revolutionize the online experience for people and brands.