Hyderabad: Even as India’s startup world is still smarting from Union commerce and industries minister Piyush Goyal’s acerbic jibes about the lack of innovation by Indian startups, Mivi, a Hyderabad-based consumer electronics startup, developed India’s first, and perhaps the world’s too, human-like artificial intelligence (AI), called Mivi AI.
Mivi AI leverages natural language processing (NLP), emotional intelligence, and context awareness to mimic human interactions, process complex language, recognise context, and understand emotions to engage in dynamic conversations.
The proprietary conversation engine, developed by the company through in-house R&D, enables the AI to listen, understand, and engage like a human being, with the underlying models being extensively trained to maintain context, continue memory across interactions, and personalise responses based on the user’s unique preferences, history, and tone.
“While existing AI models operate in a simple on-screen question-response framework, Mivi has reimagined the interaction layer from the ground up. It takes the human-AI interaction from its current form of a simple question and answer dynamic to a natural and engaging conversation format to mirror the manner in which humans interact with each other. It can interpret finer nuances in the command language and adapt to various situations, just like a human being,” said Midhula Devabhaktuni, co-founder & CMO, Mivi.
“We leveraged the full reasoning capabilities of advanced LLMs (large language models) to engineer a personalised conversation engine and trained AI models to maintain context. Mivi AI is trained on thousands of voice samples with a wide range of Indian accents,” she added.
The company has already integrated AI technology with its hearables like earbuds to start with and plans to integrate it into other devices such as home monitoring cameras, smart wearables, and IoT. “We custom-built a high-performance processor and optimised it for low energy consumption. The firmware and requirements were developed by Mivi, while we worked with a Taiwanese company to fabricate the chipset,” said Vishwanadh Kandula, Co-founder & CEO, Mivi.
“We had over 100 engineers working for over 18 months on building this technology that understands, adapts, and connects on a human level, making it feel less like a tool and more like an intuitive and emotionally aware companion, proving that world-class innovation can be built in India for the world,” Midhula added. Founded by the husband and wife duo in 2016, Mivi clocked revenues of Rs 250 crore in FY24 and is expected to notch up revenues of over Rs 300 crore in FY25.