‘Speech Therapy' for Success: Umesh

Uniphore, whose solutions allow any machine to understand and respond to natural human speech, was the 17th fastest growing technology company in India by 2012, according to Deloitte

The ability to use speech to communicate is a primary reason for the evolutionary success of the human race. Uniphore's solutions extends this insight to the evolution of human-machine interaction.

Launched in 2008, Uniphore was the 17th fastest growing technology company in India by 2012, according to Deloitte. Profitable since its second year, the company has deployed local language solutions that reach nearly 4 million people. Its strong growth and commitment to innovation have been achieved through the support of three hands-on, high-quality Seed investors: IIT Madras' Rural Technology and Business Incubator, Villgro Innovations Foundation, and the National Research Development Corporation.

INCEPTION
Umesh is the Co-Founder and CEO of Uniphore Software Systems. Convinced that India's economy would flourish if businesses were able to sell to and service customers across the country, Umesh launched Uniphore in order to achieve this vision. Uniphore began developing applications for businesses to transact and interact with customers over basic feature phones in local languages. Ravi Saraogi is the co-founder and COO of Uniphore Software Systems. Given the challenges businesses face in service delivery, Ravi envisioned that the Indian enterprise landscape was ripe for local language mobility solutions. He partnered with Umesh Sachdev to launch Uniphore with the mission of delivering relevant, fast, flexible mobile technology solutions that enable businesses to scale.

IDEA BEHIND UNIPHORE
Uniphore's solutions allows any machine to understand and respond to natural human speech, thus enabling humans to use the most natural of communication modes, speech, to engage and instruct machines. Enterprises across industry, size and geographies deploy Uniphore's solution to dramatically improve employee productivity and deliver superior customer service.

PILLARS OF STRENGTH
Uniphore has developed speech recognition and voice biometrics capabilities for 14 Indian languages by developing a "wrapper" around Nuance's core technology based on the principles of context, demographics and user-centric adaptation. The company's solutions dramatically lowers the costs of outreach and customer servicing across the country, as well as enhances the productivity of business operations and employees.

For example, in agriculture-specific applications, Uniphore's wrapper has been used to build a database of context-specific logic, meaning the development of call flows that are natural and intuitive to the user, and simultaneously serve the particular information collection and dissemination needs of agribusiness. That logic is different from the algorithmic logic Uniphore applies to banking, and it also varies across regions and cultural contexts.

The other important feature that Uniphore's application has is that it has millions of hours of spoken data on its platform, so that each application is tuned for regional particularities and accents.

Moreover, applications develop a history for each individual user - specifically; each individual's peculiarly spoken words and signal-to-noise patterns - to further enhance accuracy through adaptation.

CHALLENGES FACED IN BUILDING UNIPHORE BRAND
Uniphore's solutions are wide in focus, from airplane automation to speech-based IVR systems supporting social service delivery in rural and remote parts of the country. Building applications that are relevant and intuitive to each of these diverse populations requires deep insight into their habits, preferences, and needs. It is challenges to building customized applications for such diverse users. Therefore, Uniphore has always been sharply focused on developing strategies to enable swift adoption of technology amongst end users. This involves deploying staff to the field to train our business partners and end users on how to use technology for optimal results, and tweaking our technology to learn through user interactions.
Despite the intense time and effort required to do this work diligently, it is ultimately these insights that distinguish Uniphore as a "human-centered" technology company, delivering applications that vastly benefit both enterprises and their end users.

FUTURE CHALLENGES AND PLANS TO GROW
Right now, Uniphore is focused on expanding its global presence, by foraying into other non-English speaking regions such as South East Asia and the Middle East, where businesses face similar challenges to those Uniphore has been taking on in the Indian context. Uniphore will also look to strengthen its speech-based products, creating more context-aware, personalized applications.

As Uniphore scales, its business geographically, it needs to strike a fine balance in its technology development. The algorithms that Uniphore is building and continuously refining to enable high accuracy and usability in speech recognition must remain generic enough so that it can continue reaching into new countries, continents and languages, without having to rewrite them. But these algorithms must also be sophisticated enough to be easily tailored to individual contexts and places.