Bhavish Aggarwal, the co-founder and Chairman of the Ola group, has declared that by following their departure from Microsoft Azure Cloud, developers should now transition away from Google Maps. He has further announced (on Monday) a one-year free access offer to Ola Maps on the AI-driven Krutrim platform, along with over Rs 100 crore in free credits for developers.
Last week, Ola, the ride-hailing company, made the strategic decision to switch from Google Maps to its in-house Ola Maps for cab operations. This move is expected to save the company nearly Rs 100 crore annually.
“We’ve been using western apps to map India for too long and they don’t get our unique challenges: street names, urban changes, complex traffic, non-standard roads, etc,” Aggarwal said.
He said that Ola Maps tackles these challenges with AI-powered India-specific algorithms, real-time data from millions of vehicles, leveraging and contributing massively to open source “with more than 5 million edits just last year” to the Open Street Maps.
“We’re outperforming competitors on location accuracy, search accuracy, search latency and ETA accuracy,” said the Ola founder.
In a separate blog post, the company said Ola Maps is built to utilise the most diverse set of data and send updates in near real time to ensure the most accurate mapping data as possible.
“Our AI first data systems utilise real time data from millions of vehicles using Ola Maps, fleet of Ola S1’s equipped with 360 cameras, open-source government data repositories, OpenStreetMap, partnerships and proprietary sources to build essential map features such as roads, points of interest, street furniture, building geometry and traffic signals,” the company explained.
Last month, Aggarwal cut all his ties with Microsoft Azure and shifted his company's entire workload to in-house AI platform Krutrim.
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Ola reportedly stopped using Google Maps and has switched to its own Ola Maps for managing their cab operations. Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder and Chairman of the Ola group, mentioned that this change will result in the company saving nearly Rs 100 crore per year.
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Bhavish Aggarwal criticized LinkedIn after the platform removed his post on "pronoun illness". According to Aggarwal, LinkedIn's Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool was imposing a political ideology on Indian users, which he believes is unsafe and sinister. He expressed his concerns about the AI tool's actions in a post on another platform.
Inputs from IANS
