Indian cab service provider Ola cabs is working on assisted driving technology in Ola play and hiring professionals with autonomous self driving car coding skills — FactorDaily reported yesterday quoting three sources. Out of these three sources one in working in OLA.
While Ola denied all these claims, it has hired near 20 professionals that are having autonomous car skills.
FactorDaily has confirmed the hiring from training company Udacity. “Ola has hired people who have completed its popular three-term course in self-driving technologies.” — said Praveen Kumar, director – operations (India), Udacity confirmed the news to FactorDaily “People who go through these courses have a deep understanding of computer vision and deep learning… The code that these students write are tested on self-drive cars we have in the US,”.
Ola play is infotainment system used in ola cabs. Which includes a screen in front of rear seat with pre-buffered music and videos for passengers. But, company believed to extend this using AI make this safer for passengers and drivers.
This is great to hear because this is first attempt of any cab company in India. Companies like Uber are working on autonomous cars in US but not in India. The move made by Ola may lead it one step further than other companies in the field.
However, autonomous cars will not be successful because of its chaotic traffic and non-standard driving by people here.
Recently, Ola partnered with software giant Microsoft to improve the cab-driving experience. Microsoft is said to provide Office 365, voice-assisted controls and Azure cloud platform. Ola will also use Microsoft’s AI and Internet of Things technologies to improve the quality of driving. Details are not known.
About OLA
Ola Cabs was founded on 3 December 2010 by Bhavish Aggarwal, currently CEO, and Ankit Bhati. As of 2017, the company has expanded to a network of more than 600,000 vehicles across 110 cities. In November 2014, Ola diversified to incorporate autos on trial basis in Bangalore. Post the trial phase, Ola Auto expanded to other cities like Delhi, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata starting December 2014. In December 2015, Ola expanded its auto services in Mysore, Chandigarh, Indore, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Guwahati and Visakhapatnam. Ola was valued at $US5 billion as of September 2015.