Ola announces Krutrim AI integration in electric scooters, unveils AI chip-making plans

The Ola Sankalp 2024 event was packed with new product announcements, including the release of two new AI apps.

Ola founder Bhavesh Aggarwal at Sankalp 2024 held in Bengaluru on August 15. (Image credit: Ola)

Ola founder Bhavesh Aggarwal has said that its AI virtual assistant Krutrim will be integrated into Ola Electric scooters as part of the MoveOS5 operating system, which will be released in beta by the end of October (Diwali).

The AI upgrade was officially announced at Sankalp 2024, Ola’s annual community event, held at the Ola Campus in Bengaluru on Thursday, August 15. The event was packed with several new product launches and updates covering electric vehicles, AI, cloud services, and more.

Aggarwal also announced the release of Krutim’s AI Customer Care app, which can be used by developers to automate their customer care services. It is available in 22 Indian languages and can be onboarded by enterprises in a day. Ola Electric and Ola Cabs are already live with the AI Customer Care app so if you’re calling Ola customer service, you might be talking to an AI agent right now, Aggarwal said.

Story continues below this ad

Also Read | What is Ola’s Krutrim AI, dubbed as India’s indigenous AI?

Another AI developer app being rolled out by Krutrim is Bhashik, a multimodal language hub that can also help translate videos into other languages. “This event right now is being live-streamed in multiple languages using this platform [Bhashik],” Aggarwal said. Edtech startup Unacademy is also using Ola Krutrim’s translation API for its language learning app.

In a scripted demo, Ola Krutrim also teased a new image-recognition feature that will be coming to the AI model later this year. At the beginning of 2024, the homegrown AI startup became India’s first unicorn after raising $50 million at a valuation of $1billion.

Also Read | Ola’s Krutrim AI rates itself 7/10 on political neutrality, attributes religious polarisation to BJP

Notably, Ola is foraying into the AI chip manufacturing sector as it is designing a silicon chip called Bodhi 1, designed for frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) and vision models, that will begin rolling off production lines by 2026. It is also looking to develop a second set of AI silicon chips called Bodhi 2 that guarantees 10T+ parameter model support and will be ready by 2028.

On Ola Maps, Aggarwal said that the mapping platform’s API for developers is being expanded to cover over 95 per cent of the use cases under routing, places, maps and tiles, and SDKs. The company further teased an AI-driven e-commerce tool called Shopping Co-pilot that aims to deliver a personalised, interactive shopping experience for users. It already offers food and grocery delivery services on the government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC). Ola Consumer is set to introduce more categories on ONDC soon, the company said.

Story continues below this ad

Additionally, Ola has launched its own UPI app called Ola Pay for users to pay for rides, food, and groceries. The company’s new customer loyalty programme called Ola Coin, where users can earn rewards for every transaction they make on Ola’s ride-hailing or e-commerce platforms, is now live in Bengaluru and will be rolled out to other cities in the future.