Bharti Airtel, the second largest mobile operator in India, acquired a local start-up developing artificial intelligence (AI) services to boost the operator’s push to improve customer service with digital initiatives.

As part of the deal, AuthMe ID Services’ core team will join Airtel X Labs in Bengaluru, India. Airtel set up the digital facility to drive innovation in AI, IoT, augmented and virtual reality, it said in a statement.

It did not reveal financial details of the deal.

Harmeen Mehta, Airtel’s global CIO, said: “We are rapidly scaling up Airtel X Labs and these new solutions will accelerate our journey towards rolling out intuitive digital products, particularly in vernacular languages, for our 430 million plus customers.”

Airtel also acquired the intellectual property rights for two of AuthMe’s flagship services.

Callup AI is a chat and voice assistant which uses AI to resolve customer queries by email, chat and phone calls. It is used by ten companies in three countries in the banking, finance, payments and housing sectors.

The other solution is Fintech OCR, an end-to-end optical character recognition (OCR) application built for financial documents. It is designed for processing know your customers documents along with bank, credit card and loan statements. Airtel said it can be customised to process known formats of other documents and can pick up any language with standard fonts.