KOGO, MapMyIndia unveil AI-powered universal voice assistant for automotive sector

By Pune Media On Jan 22, 2025 16

Indian AI start-up KOGO and digital mapping company MapMyIndia have launched India’s first universal voice assistant for the automotive industry, introducing a proprietary technology that enables AI agents to communicate with each other – a capability previously unavailable in existing voice assistants.

The technology has already attracted significant interest from automotive manufacturers, with KOGO currently in discussions with six OEMs – two in India and four internationally. While specific names weren’t disclosed due to non-disclosure agreements, the company projects $4.5 million in implementations over the next four to six months as deployments begin.

Raj K. Gopalakrishnan, CEO of KOGO, explained, “Imagine a car that plans your entire day, from booking flights to paying bills, with just a voice command—this isn’t science fiction; it’s the future, and it’s here”. The VA was launched at the recently concluded Bharat Auto Expo 2025.

“The agentic mesh is the breakthrough technology that we have created. This enables multiple agents to talk to each other on a one-on-one basis directly,” he said. “We are ahead of the curve. We are ahead of all the big boys. And because we’re agile and we’re a small company, we’re very R&D focused.”

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The mesh technology functions like a team of AI experts passing conversations to one another. “A year down the line you will see that most of the technology layer that really operates any smart car is going to be based on KOGO’s agentic mesh,” Gopalakrishnan said.

The system is designed to handle increasingly complex interactions. “Today, I can ask the weather, I can ask you to book a ticket for me,” Gopalakrishnan explained. “But what if I tell the agent, can you check if there is fog in Delhi the day after tomorrow? If there is no fog in Delhi, then, can you book an airline ticket for me? I would like to leave in the evening and my preferred airline is a specific airline. And if the first row is available, book me on the first row.” While current functionality focuses on completing individual tasks, future updates will enable the system to handle broader goals and complex nested instructions.

The partnership with MapMyIndia, which also holds a stake in KOGO, brings crucial geo-intelligence capabilities to the platform. “MapMyIndia is also a customer of KOGO and a partner where we go with a common go-to-market for the automotive and mobility industry because MapMyIndia is the leader in the enterprise B2B mobility, navigation and automotive space,” explained Gopalakrishnan.

Unlike traditional voice assistants limited to basic commands, KOGO’s solution operates through fine-tuned small language models that work on-premise and at the edge, ensuring data privacy and security. “People do not want to send their data to an LLM because this is all private data, private preferences. So we have an inferencing layer that creates small language models which are fine-tuned models,” Gopalakrishnan noted.

Praveer Kochhar, Chief Product Officer and co-founder of KOGO, revealed that the platform is currently in beta, with enterprise access planned for mid-February. “What we are improving over the next few months is basically handling complex problems. Today, the system handles tasks. In the near future, it should be able to handle certain goals as well,” he said.

The technology’s applications extend beyond automotive to various sectors including insurance, banking, financial services, healthcare, and defense. “A large enterprise will be able to build their own agents, multi-agent systems that can do large process automations for them,” Praveer added.

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The development of the universal voice assistant took approximately 18 months, with research and development conducted at KOGO’s innovation lab in Cochin. “We spent a year and a half creating what is known as KOGO OS, which is the base operating system technology that runs all of this,” said Gopalakrishnan.

The platform also opens opportunities for businesses to integrate their services into vehicles. “Tomorrow if a bank wants to be part of the car, it’s very easy for them to create an AI agent on our platform and add it to the mesh,” Gopalakrishnan explained. “Literally millions of apps, millions of businesses can actually be part of this AI voice assistant just by creating an agent on our platform and just dragging and dropping it into the mesh.”

Published on January 22, 2025

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