Improves load handling capabilities by 3x
Saves 50% of infrastructure cost with Google Cloud autoscaling capabilities
Speeds up release cycles by identifying and reducing hallucinations fast
Enables a stable infrastructure without downtime, even during peak seasons
Miko uses Proprietary AI and Google Cloud infrastructure to help children globally learn and develop cognitive, analytical, and social-emotional skills.
Miko uses Proprietary AI and Google Cloud infrastructure to help children globally learn and develop cognitive, analytical, and social-emotional skills.
The saying, ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ holds true, but as society evolves over the years, lifestyles are changing and nuclear families are on the rise. As a result, children are interacting less with others. To fulfill the social and emotional wellbeing of children, Miko.ai (Miko) developed an interactive artificial intelligence (AI) robot with a human-like personality to accompany children with interactive games and academic content.
“As a company, we're focused on solving today’s unmet social needs with AI. By leveraging deep technology, we believe that our Miko bots can act as a companion and coach for children of today, while supporting them in their learning journey,” says Sneh Vaswani, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Miko.
With Miko, children can tap on tools like Reading Companion, designed to help children improve their reading skills by engaging them to read aloud, similar to how they would read with a teacher or parent. Meanwhile, Reading Buddy provides feedback to support children in their reading journey by providing a comprehensive evaluation of speech and pronunciation. Using AI, the tool continually assesses their reading levels using proprietary patented AI and offers a selection of books to encourage improvement. These books are curated according to the child’s reading level.
“To enhance engagement and personalize the reading experience, we have incorporated generative AI frameworks to create engaging stories tailored to the child’s interests and reading skill level. Our early experiments have shown promising results, and we are now preparing to take the next steps for user testing,” says Sneh.
The company launched its first bot in 2017, and today, Miko’s sold in more than 140 countries around the world. Built with children in mind, Miko prioritizes safe interaction and kid-friendly content above all, and with the support of Google Cloud as its preferred platform due to its secure, scalable, and robust solutions.
“From automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, and other features, Google Cloud has supported us with solutions that are localized to specific regions, equipped with local language capabilities which helps us to deliver the best responses to our customers,” says Sneh.
Meeting peak-season demands and supporting business growth with a highly scalable infrastructure
Apart from safe content, bots need to be highly versatile and quick to respond when children interact with it. With that in mind, Miko needed a cloud platform that would support workloads even during peak gifting seasons, especially during festive seasons like Christmas, Eid and Diwali, that can lead to large spikes of up to 100x in signups and activation that’s concentrated around this short period of time.
“One of the primary reasons for moving to Google Cloud was due to our requirements from a product perspective. We needed to ensure that our infrastructure remained stable even during the peak season, and needed a solution provider that would give us complete support in that journey,” says Sneh.
Issues around inflexibility of the tools and inconsistent performance made us rethink our infrastructure. Since moving to Google Cloud, we’ve been able to scale dynamically and implement solutions swiftly to support our expanding operations.
Prashant Iyengar
Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Miko.ai
Now, Miko hosts its platform on Google Cloud databases to leverage the open and unified data and AI solution, and uses Memorystore for sub-millisecond data access. At the same time, the company is constantly looking at adopting new services as its platform evolves. “We are implementing Cloud Run for better scaling capabilities and are exploring even more Vertex AI services to enhance our platform,” says Prashant Iyengar, Chief Technology Officer at Miko.
Miko moved its infrastructure to Google Cloud in 2020, and since then, has seen an increase of 3x in load handling capabilities with Cloud Load Balancing. The team also recorded a 50% savings in infrastructure with the autoscaling capabilities of Google Cloud.
With its user base growing by three to four times annually, Miko started facing challenges with its multi-cloud infrastructure. “Issues around inflexibility of the tools and inconsistent performance made us rethink our infrastructure. Since moving to Google Cloud, we’ve been able to scale dynamically and implement solutions swiftly to support our expanding operations,” shares Prashant.
Building smarter, safer bots with Gemini
Our goal is to ensure Miko Robots provide safe, reliable, and culturally appropriate interactions for children worldwide, and Gemini is key to achieving this.
Sneh Vaswani
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Miko.ai
With four to 12 year-olds as its target audience, safety and security is and has always been a priority for Miko. With that, responsible and ethical AI is key to everything the team at Miko does. “Every large tech organization has guardrails to protect the privacy of their customers, and for us, those guardrails need to be five times stricter,” says Sneh.
“Our goal is to ensure Miko Robots provide safe, reliable, and culturally appropriate interactions for children worldwide, and Gemini is key to achieving this,” he adds.
As a bot that provides information to its users, Miko is aware that it needs to provide information that is not only safe, but accurate.
With that, the ability for the right large language model (LLM) that can help identify any potential hallucinations in Miko.AI stack was a key factor for the team and “We found that Gemini is able to accurately identify hallucinations, which allows us to be proactive and detect any hallucinations early to be rectified,” says Prashant. “By incorporating Gen AI into the quality assessment framework, we’ve been able to achieve faster release cycles.”
A solution provider that goes above and beyond
While Google Cloud technology had impressed the team at Miko, the support they received from the Google team was just as important, particularly in customizing and deploying customized solutions to meet specific operational needs.
From proof-of-concept (POC) setups to test-run specific features, to training sessions on new technologies that Google Cloud offers, Miko is informed. “The Google Cloud team has been very proactive, and helped us with our infrastructure, security and networking optimization, which has not only improved our efficiency, but also reduced our costs year on year,” says Sneh.
With so many new AI innovations on the horizon, Miko will continue to focus on the safety of its content, while researching and building on new applications that will benefit users around the world. “This year, we plan to launch a software development kit (SDK) powered by our proprietary LLM, and we look to work with Google Cloud even more closely to host and grow this platform safely,” adds Sneh.
This year, we plan to launch SDK of our platform powered by our proprietary LLM, and we look to work with Google Cloud even more closely to host and grow this platform safely.
Sneh Vaswani
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Miko.ai
Founded in 2015, Miko is an advanced consumer robotics innovations lab passionate about bringing the best of technology to young learners everywhere. With children aged 4-12 as their primary audience, Miko combines AI, robotics and IoT to deliver a fun and engaging learning journey.
Industry: Education
Location: India
Products: Google Cloud, AI Infrastructure, BigQuery, Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud Run, Memorystore, Security Command Centre, Vertex AI, Speech to Text, Gemini
About Google Cloud Partner - Searce
Searce is a technology provider that aims to drive intelligent outcomes for customers. Specializing in cloud, AI and analytics, Searce is a Google Cloud partner that pushes the boundaries of tech innovation with end-to-end industry solutions.
