Few days before, I was reading an article about voice recognition tool, I come across with the name of UBONA Company. So I searched about it and found that ‘last year, Ubona Technologies of Bangalore was awarded No. 1, with revenue growth of 1,353%.’ This is judged by Deloitte India at the program of ‘The seventh Technology Fast 50 award’ which was held on 21 October 2011 at Bangalore. This excites me to know more about this company.

And found this on their site about  them ‘Ubona Technologies, a Bangalore based Technology Company founded in 2007,  was set up to address the barrier of adoption of value added telephony by enabling discovery and interaction possible with the simplest possible phone model. The team at Ubona foresaw a world where getting information and interacting using phone is easy, quick, useful and enriching for everyone. Through its comprehensive suite of value added telephony enabling technologies and the continuous endeavor to create more, Ubona is all set to realize the dream of making value added telephony consumable by masses.

Ubona specializes in Pattern Recognition and Search Technologies – which includes Speech Recognition, Music Fingerprinting technologies and large scale search algorithm, and use these technologies to provide Search and Discovery of music to people in India using a basic mobile phone. Ubona powers music VAS services in most of the leading Operators in India.’

Ubona is a company that targets service providers and helps them adopt Value Added Services (VAS) for millions of their customers. Their very first idea was to develop a voice recognition tool and use it to locate and connect to restaurants, businesses etc without actually knowing the number. For Bangalore, developing a ‘Foodie Hotline’ – where one just needed to say the name of a restaurant and get connected to it, was one of the initial milestones of the company.

The live wire of Ubona’s service is its state of the art speech recognition platform. The speech recognition platform is completely in-house developed and uses a paradigm different from the prevailing methodologies. At Ubona, speech recognition is performed using our own architecture and algorithms.

You know their name (Ubona) is unique and different, the story behind this is ‘Ubona means ‘to hear’ in Swahili, but more importantly they had selected it because they wanted to have a five letter word which sounded unique, easy to pronounce and spell’.

Founded by Jyotirmoy Chakravorthy(Assam Engineering College) who has a massive 22 years of experience in companies like Wipro and eCapital under his belt, and his team are Umesh Singhal (CSE-93), Vishal Lal (EEE-98) and Anshuman Purushottam (MIN-99), Giridhar Shanbagh(University of Mysore)and Shishir Mittal work as a Software Analyst. A vibrant group of innovators, dreamers, and technologists, team Ubona is a potent mix. With an impressive set of patents under their belt, the team is all about making the world simpler through technology.

 Ubona relies on keeping its products dynamic and ever-changing including conceptualizing new services on their platform and demonstrating them to their customers. They continuously change and keep the services afresh so that consumer’s interest is always alive.

Latest achievement of Ubona is ‘Tata Sky partners with Ubona Technologies to launch voice activated service.’ Tata Sky Ltd., the joint venture from TATA and STAR in partnership with Ubona Technologies, a leading provider of speech recognition solutions for businesses and consumers in India, today announced the launch of yet another unique innovative Interactive Voice Response (IVR) application being used exclusively by Tata Sky at their call centre facilitates to support the huge demand from its subscribers this festive season. The Ubona's system offers a seamless experience and highly reliable speech recognition to subscribers. It is tailored specifically to the Indian context where people speak in multitude of languages, accents and dictions. The system will help the Tata Sky subscriber reduce the unnecessary waiting period while booking for value add-on packages or the popular Showcase movies. Once the subscriber dials in at the Tata Sky helpline, the subscriber now has an option of the Ubona IVR service which guides him through the process of choosing the required service. Additionally the system provides information on the monthly charges before adding the package and is also equipped to check for balance in the subscriber's account. Alternatively the subscriber also has the option of speaking to the Tata Sky customer care executive directly for additional information.

In an interview Jyotirmoy Chakravorthy(CEO of Ubona) speaks about  challenges faced by his company and that are Creating the technology, evolving the business model, getting the first customer and making the product a success provide a glimpse of what Ubona has been through. ‘As a company one advantage they have is that they owing to the domain they operate in, anything which makes business sense, is and needs  to be inherently scalable’, this  informs Jyotimoy in a interview of him.

And now after knowing Ubona I can say that Ubona Technologies was set up to address the barrier of adoption of value added telephony by enabling discovery and interaction possible with the simplest possible phone model. The team at Ubona foresaw a world where getting information and interacting using phone is easy, quick, useful and enriching for everyone. Through its comprehensive suite of value added telephony enabling technologies and the continuous endeavor to create more, Ubona is all set to realize the dream of making value added telephony consumable by masses.

Being among only a few companies in the world to have a speech and music recognition product in the larger consumer environment can be looked at as an early achievement, and a sign of bigger things to come.

Thanks Rupanjali for this post