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.
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