Ever thought about how cool it would be to shop online without scratching your head to find the English name for your favorite local product? What if your favorite e-commerce app can understand and respond in your language? How convenient it would be to change TV channels just by voice command? How about a self-help call center where you can ask voice queries in your language? Ever thought of moving to a new city without worrying about how to communicate with the auto drivers, fruit vendor or a bus conductor? Imagine a daily wage worker who could fulfil all his banking needs from home in his language without taking his time off to visit the bank. The field of voice technology and natural language understanding promises to solve these problems, and the like. IndiaSpeaks Research Labs, through its rigorous R&D approach, is building its proprietary voice technology tools and applications with the aim to cater to the needs of the common mass and businesses that face these problems.
India, the land of diversity has over 1600 regional languages and dialects. This diversity, however, has a flip side: huge communication gap that puts limits on small businesses to operate nation-wide, and mental barriers on individuals to communicate freely with anyone across the country. Further, large businesses fail to completely capture the huge rural Indian market, the main reason being the lack of last-mile connectivity, be it service delivery, content publishing and consumption, localization, etc. Given the scale of the uncaptured subset of the Indian market, and the cut-throat competition in almost every business sector, every business needs to adapt to the customer’s needs, rather other way around in order to stay ahead in the race (Courtesy: Charles Darwin). Big corporates to MSMEs understand this and incorporate features that add value to their offerings. In a feature-driven market, adoption of “multi-lingual support” can be a game changer.
Recent advancements in the voice and language technology field have paved a new way for businesses to improve their customer acquisition, customer retention and customer satisfaction rates. Adoption of these technologies poses yet another unique set of problems in the Indian context owing to the complicated grammar, morphology, diversity in vocabulary, accent and dialects, etc. At IndiaSpeaks, we build voice technology tools by balancing the contemporary business needs and linguistic limitations to provide reliable and scalable solutions that will drive the future of voice technology in India. These artificial intelligence (AI) solutions can be highly accurate only when large amount of annotated voice and text data is available for training. This training data collection process also presents excellent job opportunities to people from Tier2+ cities with diverse skillsets.
IndiaSpeaks is a 9-month-old startup formed by a team of researchers and engineers from IISc Bangalore. We have come a long way from writing research papers on speech technology to delivering industry-standard products. We focus on building voice technology tools for Indian languages that enable end-customers to interact with mobile apps/websites through voice interface. We also work on call-center automation and integration of voice interface in CRM tools. Our products use state-of-the-art neural network-based voice recognition, text-to-speech and natural language processing tools that were built from scratch. We develop advanced in-house AI-based tools such as voice recognition, text-to-voice conversion and natural language processing powered text-analysis tools. Our tools can be easily adapted to build end-to-end voice services for 8 different business sectors: e-commerce, entertainment, BFSI, payments, automobiles, home automation, healthcare and travel/hospitality.
Currently, we provide support for English, Hindi, Tamil and Kannada; and we are planning to extend it for Telugu, Bangla, Gujarati, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia and Assamese by the end of 2023. We believe, applications built atop our voice technology suite will embolden common people to use their language with pride and at the same time facilitate effective business communication thereby serving the next 500 million vernacular internet users in India.
