I was based in Chennai until two weeks ago - when I shifted to Mumbai. But I'll be frequenting Chennai on a regular basis and think it would be great to re-active the Silk Chapter. Lots of great stuff going on in that city.
Sankarshan gave a pretty good explanation of what the technology does. I'm sure you've heard of Siri on the iPhone, right? Well, that's English language speech recognition. My company has been doing joint R&D with IIT Madras in order to develop that in 14 Indian languages and several hundred dialects. And rather than putting the technology on the device, we combine it with IVR and GPRS to build applications for businesses. For example, imagine an agri company that wants to deliver and capture information from the farmers it works with. Our solution enables them to deliver customized information to farmers through pre-scheduled voice announcements (about weather conditions, etc). Also, farmers can instantly access information related to the business by calling into the system and having an automated, human-like conversation in their local language. Voice-based surveys can also be scheduled to customers to get feedback related to products and services. Voice-based solutions work on any basic mobile phone, across platforms. So it helps businesses reach out to their customers, overriding barriers of illiteracy, and the lack of local language capabilities on phones. So far, voice-based solutions are seeing the most uptake in agriculture, banking, financial services and healthcare. But in a country with such diverse languages and sociogeographic conditions - the world is our oyster, it seems. On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 10:39 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian <[email protected]> wrote: > I am still in chennai, for my sins. Let us meet up. > > --srs (iPad) > > On 18-Nov-2012, at 22:09, Badri Natarajan <[email protected]> wrote: > >>> >>> About a year and a half ago, I decided to move to India in order to >>> run the marketing for a company called Uniphore, an enterprise >>> mobility company that harnesses Indian language speech technology. >>> It’s a for-profit, sustainable, business - but our technology can play >>> a major role in bringing services to the poor and marginalized by >>> overcoming barriers of illiteracy and poor infrastructure. My time >>> with the company so far has given me invaluable insights about social >> >> Hey Caitlin, >> >> Welcome to silk. >> >> Your work sounds really interesting - could you explain a bit more? I am not >> sure what an "enterprise mobility company that harnesses Indian language >> speech technology" does, but my wife is learning Tamil and finding her way >> around Chennai so she may find it interesting too.. >> >> Your blog says you are based in Chennai? Perhaps it's time to revive Chennai >> silk meets so you can meet some of the regulars - I am not sure who lives in >> Chennai now - the last silk meet I can remember in Chennai was years ago at >> Liu's Waldorf with Suresh.. >> >> Badri > -- Caitlin Marinelli blog: http://caitlinmarinelli.wordpress.com/ cell (India): +91 7305598165
