Conversational Commerce is a Green Field

[ An interview with Bahubali Shete, founder of the “Google Maps for Recipes” ]

We sat down with Bahubali Shete, CEO of Klove Chef, to ask him about the emerging field of voice based commerce and his perspective as an older, experienced serial entrepreneur. As a recent alumni of FOOD-X cohort 6, he just closed his seed funding round and returned to the USA to be with his team after spending time with family in India.

Frank (from Food-X): Well, first of all, let me ask you, what does your company do?

Bahubali: Klove Chef (IOK Labs, Inc) is a voice-guided platform for cooking. What we mean is that we can take any recipe, convert that into a conversational recipe, and personalize it on the fly, walking you through it using your favorite voice assistant, like Amazon Alexa or Google Home, which helps you cook it. For our partners, we are a voice commerce and voice analytics company, which means that we partner with companies like meal kits, CPG companies, and appliance or kitchen tool companies so that they can get analytical data. Data like who is cooking what, when, where, what time of the day, what day of the week, etc…they can also get details about how long they took to cook a recipe, what was the difficult step, what was the easy step, how did they skip it and all that. So we are an analytical platform, plus we are also a voice commerce platform.

Frank: You’ve used the word “voice commerce.” I have also heard the term “conversational commerce.”

Bahubali: Yes.

The Klove Chef Platform

Frank: What’s new in this industry, and what are the challenges of conversation or voice commerce?

Bahubali: Voice commerce is genuinely an exciting trend that is happening right now. It’s currently $2.2 billion as of today, and it’s going to grow to $40 billion by 2022. What we see is that very few players are in this field right now. Amazon is doing it, of course, and Google is doing it to some extent. But not many startups are actually into this field. It’s a very green field and exciting for us. It makes it very easy for the consumers to make their purchases. It’s a natural way of saying that “I want to buy this” or “I want to add this to my shopping list or cart” and just get on with it.

Frank: So conversational commerce, or voice commerce, is interacting with a platform without typing in text. It’s all through voice and all through basically oral as in-ear listening feedback, correct?

Bahubali: That’s right. It’s all about the voice assistants having some way of validating your account. There is a voice code for it. Just like you have PINs and OTPs in other e-commerce, you have voice PINs here. You need to say those voice PINs in order to verify that you’re the right user and placing the order.

Frank: I guess the big players in this industry would be Google, Amazon, and Apple. Is there anyone else? Are all of the big tech companies in this?

Bahubali: No. Actually speaking, only Google and Amazon are in this field right now. Apple isn’t doing anything yet. Not even Microsoft.

Frank: Okay. So it’s still very early.

Bahubali: Or at least it’s not visible publicly if others are already working on it.

Frank: Your company will be working on a layer that works on these platforms?

Bahubali: That’s correct. We are a platform, a voice commerce platform on the voice assistants. Amazon and Google give us the basic conversational platform, and on top of it, we build our platform to enable the voice commerce part of it.

Frank: When you were fundraising, what kind of feedback did you have from the investors? I mean, did you have to educate them on this? Are they pretty knowledgeable about it already?

Bahubali: In some cases, yes, I did have to educate them because this is ultimately a green field. People are excited about it. But as an investor, they’re also skeptical about it in terms of: “Is it really the big thing, is it really going to explode, or is it really going to be a big thing next few years?” Fortunately, there is enough data available to show that this is something which is growing exponentially and this is something which is going to be the future. We have been able to give that kind of data for the investors to convince them to come on board.

Frank: As a startup, what are the challenges you face? Is it development, is it user experience, is it partnerships?

Bahubali: Yeah, see, there are two things. One is the developing the experience part of it. Unlike the traditional interaction design, where it is touch, swipe, or some other means of interacting with your apps and other solutions, here it is all voice. Moreover, voice is straightforward in terms of the user experience, but very difficult in terms of actual implementation. One has to literally understand the nuances of what the users can say, and based on that be able to accurately anticipate different reactions from the user’s responses, and in the most natural way respond back to the users and confirm correctly. There is quite a bit of AI and machine learning NLP which goes behind it, not to talk about that, but on top of it also we build ML algorithms to make sure that we understand the pattern of interactions and correctly respond to them.

Also, the most challenging part here in our development has been finding the interaction designer. Voice interaction design is something entirely new, and most of the interaction designers who have come out from the colleges who have been working in this industry, are used to most of the visual elements or visual part of the designs. That’s where it’s been challenging. Fortunately for us, we got Nandini Stocker who was the former head of interaction design for Google. She was also managing the partnerships, and has come on board as an advisor to us. That has helped us tremendously.

Frank: So you exist in actually two continents, in Asia as well as in the U.S. What do you think about the development of this market of conversational commerce or voice commerce in your own home country of India?

Bahubali: Fortunately, in both India and the U.S., voice commerce is growing at a rapid pace. Amazon and Google have enabled these solutions in both the continents. Because of this, I see there is a high potential literally everywhere, even in India.

Frank: Maybe to shift gears a little, you’re a serial entrepreneur. So you have done other startups, maybe not in sort of the new media sector or sectors, but you’ve been in several startups. How does your experience differ between the startups that you have previously done and this startup that you are doing today?

Bahubali: The previous startups were more on the technology solutions which we were building. The first one which I did was a robotic valet parking which is, again, more technology oriented. There is a lot that goes in it in terms of developing the technology, then the user experience part was also important, but that has not been the prime focus for us. In the second startup, we’ve developed the IoT platform which was again…I mean, back in 2011, people hadn’t heard of IoT, but we started off building IoT platform back then. Still, that was a different experience of building a cutting-edge technology platform, and that was also more technology oriented in terms of being able to provide an SDK kind of solution for B2B companies.

Frank: In this recent time, you have been working with a distributed team. Can you tell me about your experience of handling people in different places and different locations?

Bahubali Shete — Co-Founder and CEO of Klove

Bahubali: Fortunately for me since I have been working remotely with multiple teams in the past…I was in Ireland, and I was taking care of teams in India and Germany. When I was in the U.S., I was also working with teams across multiple development locations in the U.S. and different companies. The same thing happened when I was in Tata Elxsi, another outsourcing organization based out of India, where I was working with remote teams from U.S., Europe, Japan, all parts of the world. Working remotely with a team has been my, I would say, strong point. I have never seen that as a challenge.

Frank: Concerning your impact in the world is there a way that Klove Chef is making a difference regarding foodways, transparency, driving consumer demand for better quality food, or even plant-based proteins?

Bahubali: If I look at it more holistically, I think what we are trying to do is bring back healthier habits for families. You can now cook the dish you want at home, and cook with confidence. A recent survey tells us that most Americans want to cook at home, but they struggle because the experience of following a recipe is antiquated. That’s where we come in and then make that experience so natural and so intuitive that they feel it’s very much like…we keep comparing ourselves with Google Maps. Just like using Google Maps, someone can say that I can go from point A to point B in any part of the world without knowing where I am driving. The same thing can happen with Klove Chef, that people can walk into their kitchen and then say that I can cook any dish I would like using Klove Chef. That will bring back home cooking, healthier eating habits, more importantly, it will also bring back the quality of family time, and it’s a lot bigger motive behind it than just helping them to cook. Moreover, it also reduces food waste of course, and as part of it, we are also offering the personalization which will help them to replace the meat with plant-based meat as well. All these possibilities are there. Klove Chef is going to be the real good thing.

Frank: Now that you have been in the United States again for the last few weeks, do you think that Americans have lost the ability to cook because they’re living away from their parents and they were never formally trained at home? Now we have a generation of people who left college or left school, and they’re living on fast food and takeout food. How are you helping to address this sort of knowledge gap among this generation of cooking at home?

Bahubali: Frank, you will be surprised that the new generation is called Yum generation.

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