The Modi-government’s demonetisation move paved the way for digital payments and transactions in a big way. In the following days, many Indians switched to mobile wallets and UPI apps for digital payments.

But a USAID-Intellecap study says that today, 22 months later, the level of cash in circulation is pretty much similar to what it was before demonetisation, with cash still being the preferred mode of payment. To give you an idea, out of the 300 million people in India that use Smartphones, a staggering 270 million people rely on cash payments for simple tasks such as a mobile recharge.

So why is Bharat Reluctant to use technology? There are three factors for this:

Language barrier : In a country that has at least 22 major spoken languages, technology providers face the challenge of reaching out to non-English speakers. Apps with an English language interface have a slim chance of reaching out to the majority of Indians who don’t know the language. Thanks to Smartphone penetration and competitive internet tariffs, nine out of ten people who are using the internet for the first time today are non-English speakers and they will soon outnumber English speaking users.

India saw the first step in localizing technology in 2017 when the government mandated local phone manufacturers to include official languages support. Today, a few messaging, social media and utility apps have also joined the bandwagon and provide user-interface in multiple Indian languages. If technology companies want to deep dive into Bharat, they should enable users to do more than just chatting and browsing through social media in their native language. While eCommerce apps have made their interface available in Indian languages, the payment interface is still in English, thereby discouraging masses from transacting online. If tech companies want their products to be accepted and used, they need to sideline English and focus on building end-to-end products with multiple native language capabilities.

Complicated interface: Tech companies should look at making their digital interfaces so simple that both non-English speakers and first-time internet users can adopt to it.

Personal touch: Transacting online can be quite intimidating for first time users, so adding a human touch to digital interactions can warm up people to the idea of online transactions.

Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are all leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to solve the above barriers. Technology providers are using Automated Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU), to assist users with more than just translation.

An increasing number of companies are leveraging ASR, NLU and NLP to build AI voice assistants to help users with online transactions. Home-grown start-ups such as Niki.ai are harnessing AI to build localised and voice-first interfaces that are easy to use. The start-up’s conversational commerce interface has been widely adopted by players in the BFSI sector. Niki.ai has already built for Hindi and English consumers, and will be launching for Tamil too this year. The growth story of India’s digitisation has shifted from the metros to Bharat. Technology companies today are sitting on a goldmine — trillions of dollars of untapped Bharat market. Now is the time to harness the power of AI to truly understand, solve and lead Bharat towards complete digitisation.

The writer is a well-known entrepreneur and philanthropist

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