JioHotstar's Riya voice assistant supports natural language search queries, allowing users to find shows based on genre or seasons.
RIL is also bringing Voice Print, a new technology that translates foreign content to Indian languages
Photo Credit: RIL
Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) held its 48th annual general meeting (AGM) on Friday. During the announcement-laden live-stream event, RIL Chairman Mukesh Ambani and his son Akash Ambani, the Chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (RJIL), announced the Jio IPO, new deployments of 5G technology, new Jio Frames smartglasses, as well as new improvements for the content streaming platform, JioHotstar. The company is now introducing a new voice-enabled search assistant called Riya to the platform, which will help users discover content.
During the event, Akash Ambani spoke about the launch of JioHotstar streaming platform, which was created after a merger of Viacom 18 and Disney's Star India in November 2024, creating the JioStar venture. The venture then brought together JioCinema and Disney Hotstar platforms to create JioHotstar.
Ambani highlighted that JioStar offers more than 3.2 lakh hours of content, claiming that it is six times more than the combined content duration of the next two OTT platforms. The company plans to add 30,000+ hours of new content to the platform every year.
Sharing numbers from the newly created streaming platform, Ambani said the JioHotstar app registered more than 600 million users on board within three months. Additionally, the platform was used in more than 75 million connected TVs during this period. Currently, the JioHotstar platform has 300 million active subscribers, making it the world's second-largest streaming platform.
JioStar is also adding four new features to the platform. First is Riya, a voice-enabled search assistant that supports natural language queries. This means users will not have to make keyword-focused queries, and can ask it to find shows and movies based on genre, year of release, number of seasons, and total episodes. Ambani did not mention whether the voice assistant is backed by an AI model or not.
The second is Voice Print, an AI-powered real-time voice translation feature. Ambani said the feature is designed for sports content and other entertainment formats in foreign languages. The AI tool uses voice cloning and lip-sync technology to dub the audio in multiple Indian languages. The company did not reveal the number of languages supported by the tool, or the AI model powering the feature.
Next, the company is adding a visual personalisation feature dubbed JioLenZ. It essentially adjusts and customises how the content appears on the stream. With this, users will be able to add scores as overlay, switch language, view commentary tracks as pop-outs, and more. The interface also automatically adjusts different layers based on the device user is streaming the content on.
Finally, JioHotstar is also rolling out MaxView 3.0. Building on the existing experience system for cricket matches watched on smartphones, the upgraded system better aligns live scorecards, camera angles, and higlights to a vertical video stream for smartphones. Interestingly, all the layers are swipeable, allowing users to not leave the stream to make adjustments for how the content appears.
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