Digital India

Zomato is launching 10-mins food delivery and is playing it super safe with the announcement.

The team (including Deepinder) is using the right language and is sharing the data points behind the decision, as we all know the raging sentiment against the model.

From the official announcement 👇

We deeply care about how we do what we do. So the first thing we told ourselves when we thought about instant food delivery was “no compromises”. We narrowed down to these eight principles around which we are building Zomato Instant– 

1. (Almost) as affordable as home-cooked food
2. Highest quality of fresh food
3. World class hygiene practices
4. Minimal use of plastic packaging
5. Convenient packaging for quick/easy consumption 
6. Traceable supply chain (v2)
7. Delivery partner safety 
8. Deep collaboration with restaurant partners – from their official announcement

These are great data points (well integrated frontend and backend), but the team, if they are really serious (and I am sure, they are) they should just focus on answering the most fundamental questions around the model.

What if the driver is delayed by a few mins? Will they be penalised? Who is going to pay the fine?
Most delivery companies have been completely opaque about this – but those in the industry know the dynamics (hint: it never works out well for the gig workers).

When your marketing promotion says ’10 minutes delivery’, clearly somebody is tracking that and has a KPI built around it.

When KPI fails, somebody will pay for the delay. Who is that somebody?

What if the driver meets with an accident?
Let’s bring the elephant in the room.

Every week, quite a few delivery drivers meet with an accident and ALL of such delivery companies have a defined protocol around it.

• A quick replacement is always ready (there is enough supply of such talent) within a few minutes
• There is a team which ensures news doesn’t reach the media.
  Media anyways doesn’t want to report such cases – after all, there is a lot of advertising money at stake.
• And in most of the cases, there is not much of real-help given to drivers / families (unless social media catches the story).
  And that’s very rare.
  
  So far, we have heard of only 1 driver dying in a road accident in the last 8+ years of such businesses in practice. You see, the elephant?

No. the companies aren’t evil – but the system is designed to benefit only a certain set of individuals and not the ones who have to bear their hustle.

10-mins delivery increases the pressure on the driver – no matter what a company says, it’s the damn reality. We are just making it hard for the delivery ecosystem.

And it’s time we look beyond upside to the company (valuation), but also ask – what’s the downside for these gig-workers and what’s the course of action if something happens to them?

What’d Zomato do in such cases? There is no transparency (and it true for all such companies). And please note – a twitter thread won’t help – that’s just for the echochamber. Your drivers aren’t on twitter – and most don’t even know if at all the companies they serve have any insurance or healthcare policy in case of accidents or death.

What will help is a real skin in the game and a clearly laid policies that breaks away from the regular corporate BS of legal status of gig workers.

Till then, it is just a hustle by top management – and delivery workers are just a pawn to make that hustle (and valuation jump) happen.

India’s local language market is booming and Reverie, which has been one of the earliest players in this space has not just seen the evolution of the market, but has also played a crucial role in growing the space.

NextBigWhat interviewed Reverie‘s Bhupen (Tech Manager) and Pranjal (AGM) to get a deep dive into this space . The interview takes a deep dive into the changing landscape of Bharat’s consumption market (voice, video and text) and how, Bharat focused companies can really accelerate their GTM plan.

The Bharat market has evolved over the last few years. Reverie has been an early player in this space. What are some of the trends you are seeing (in content creation, the evolution of formats)? 

Before the internet existed, the content creation was mostly published through the print media only (apart from people’s personal diaries and notes). Even the use of computers for content creation would depend on eventually printing and publishing (popularly called the Desk-Top Publishing). India adopted DTP widely and extensively. The Internet came to India in 1995 ; Websites and blogs evolved as digital publishing media.

As Reverie has observed, there have been serious changes in the way Indian language content has been created in the last decade. The internet runs on international standards. The international standards did not adopt Indian national standards that were used for Indian language DTP and other computer based content generation.

The Internet in India was without “any” Indian language ability for at least 15 years and gradually different languages have found support based on the priorities of Operating system makers.

Indian users already used to Indian tech and tools, couldn’t benefit from the same and the tech was never adopted by the international software makers. Indian users in the meanwhile have struggled and either adapted to English, learnt to write native languages in English script or just about starting to learn the use of native languages now.

Typing through English first keyboards being a serious difficulty, readership is disproportionately large compared to the content contributors. Large amounts of erroneous and mixed format content gets created (for example, all Indian languages written in English script spelling words in a variety of ways). With such a mix of content, there is no search engine or computing analytics that are able to help the Indian language content users.

Voice has been said to be an alternative and might seem like an easy tool, but there is very little use so far for voice as a content generation tool. It is still predominantly a search or an assistant interface.

These are perhaps the reasons why video content creation and consumption remains the fastest growing media in India compared to other geographies/languages- 

• 70s till today Print medium – Continues to be consumed
• 90s Content was there on Internet – Unicode broke this
• 2000s Video, TV – People consumed TV in local language
• 2020s Growth in digital media but still primary consumption is through video for entertainment, and less for educational purposes.

How has the consumption behavior changed over the last few years? 

With the pandemic, consumption of educational content has increased. 

The new initiatives to teach professional courses (Engineering to begin with) in several native languages has also led to the translations and publishing of technical course books. It is obviously expected that this will increase readership of academic courses in native languages in print and eventually on the digital media.

In spite of the market evolving in terms of content consumption, creating text content for the Bharat market still continues to be a challenge. What’s your take on this? How do you think this can be solved?

Literacy in India has crossed 75% with English literacy around 10%. While 100% of the 10% English literate are able to type, Indian language digital literacy within the 65% native language only literates is nearly nil.

Content creation for Bharat still remains a very big challenge. Most scholars and experts in various fields who  are proficient in expressing in native languages, do not type in a native language. Unless barriers to voluntary and spontaneous content creation can be minimised, this will remain an issue.

The problems are as enlisted-

1. The physical keyboards on computing devices were borrowed from English typewriters and designed for English. They were not designed for Indian languages
2. Indian languages are learnt and written (and hence typed) very differently from English. Since this is not taught at all, learning on one’s own on English first keyboards isn’t obvious and creates a barrier.
3. No keyboard standards leading to multiple keyboard types. Indian language typing tool is the highest searched Indian language software. So, people continue to struggle and one is unable to teach another because they may have different keyboards.

The above said problems can only be resolved at a policy level change, where  India needs to own the internet.

Even multilingual content / discovery isn’t a focus among most Bharat startups. Tell us about Reverie’s product portfolio and how it can help startups who are building for Bharat. What are some of the use cases that Reverie is resolving.

In the last 12 years, Reverie Language Technologies has come to the forefront to fulfill language adoption through the entirety of a digital customer journey by integrating voice, video and text. Language adoption is now an integral part of digital customer experience and engagement. Reverie supports both enterprises and government agencies to build the multilingual enablement ground up.

Put together our product portfolio caters to the five  key stages of digital customer journey-

• Awareness through localised and personalised customer communication.
• Customer Onboarding via website , app, through video or voice.
• Customer Engagement – post login interfaces for the digital assets , chat/voice bot enablement
• Customer Experience 
• Cross-selling and upselling through self-serve mode

Our modus Operandi –

As more and more people are coming online, it is important that companies speak in the language they understand. An average Indian would only know 2-3 languages and it will require a large talent pool to have their websites translated and managed effectively. This is where Anuvadak does its job effortlessly as a one stop solution for all the Indian languages.

A website can be localised without writing code. A website created in multiple languages becomes hard to maintain whenever the content is changed. Anuvadak takes care of detecting changes and automates updation of changes in all languages.

But, more importantly, any website today is valuable only if it can be discovered. Anuvadak makes a website in multiple languages, also SEO ready. Thus, it can be searched and discovered.

A javascript code is placed at the client’s end and all the translations are managed inside Anuvadak. This eliminates the need for a separate CMS for each language. We have thus far helped multiple clients across industries like e-Commerce, BFSI, Governments, Gaming etc.

For any application/product that gets developed , the interface with which the app interacts with its users , is of utmost importance. With so many people via multiple devices, coming on the internet for the first time , product developers need to innovate user experience keeping in mind the newness and the maturity cycle of such users. Over the years Reverie’s voice suite has been matured enough to enable end to end (from discovery- to command / inquiry to transaction) fulfillment through the voice channel be it automated IVRs or multilingual chatbots enabled on WhatsApp, website or in-app.

The voice suite comprises three key APIs- Speech to Text  or Automated Speech Recognition, Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Text to Speech. 

Our voice suite also empowers customer education and communication through video localisation. 

To ensure that everything is not lost in translation, our Transliteration API is built for Industry-specific, multilingual vocabularies for high accuracy. The API also has the Unique ability to handle ambiguous words.

It is trained for Proper nouns conversion like names of people, brands, stores, clinics, addresses – all location details, food items – grocery lists, restaurant order lists. 

Transliteration API, also supports media conversion like lyrics conversion to multiple languages, movie and song details.

Be it a startup or a corporate, launching digital products in different geographies with local flavor continues to be a challenge. What do you think can help accelerate this? 

We feel it’s more of a mindset and perception challenge, and the trend is to create a product in English and then adapt the same for Indian languages or other geographies. We believe that thinking about the geography ground up, will help eliminate challenges, and in fact liberate the development team and in the process accelerate building for Bharat which is India inclusive.

What’s your take on the next 3 years of building for Bharat market. How will the digital landscape evolve?

It is hard to predict because India is facing changes on multiple fronts and there are many factors influencing the changes. The pandemic itself has fueled behavioral changes in how people accepted and engaged on the internet. But, the internet is still a difficult medium for non English users. The huge demand and influx of non English Indian users accelerates the focus on making the internet friendlier for Indian users in local languages.

With professional education initiated in non English languages, it will also spawn creation of textbooks, guide books, tutorials, evaluations and a variety of educational tools in Indian languages. More importantly, within the next three years, we should also expect to see a lot of people using local languages as the language for business. With voice and other technologies advancing to make Indian language engagements easier, this will continue to accelerate.

Government plans to set up a research unit to back up policy decisions with well researched data.

The government is planning to set up a research unit within its information dissemination wing – Press Information Bureau – through which it aims to strengthen daily content generated by official channels with well researched material on all significant policy decisions.

The idea behind a research unit is to ensure that all official information which PIB generates through press conferences, official handouts as well as through its social media handles, is backed with well researched and factual data, which can effectively help in dispelling any kind of lack of information or misinterpreted data, sources aware of the development said.

[Via]