Ozonetel launches speech recognition technology

By using the technology, businesses can market their services to rural population without having to worry about the education level of such target audiences

Ozonetel, a Hyderabad-based CaaS (communication-as-a-service) start-up, has launched a speech recognition technology that will enable businesses to reach the base of the pyramid market segments.

Founded in 2011 by Murthy Chintalapati, Ozonetel had acquired Silicon Valley-based Yantra Software’s speech recognition business in August 2014 in a pay-out model.

“The interactive voice response (IVR)-based technology will help people who cannot read and write to verbally respond to the IVR prompts (also in local languages) instead of having to feed in digits through the mobile keypad. Our vision is to solve the customer communication problems for businesses,” said Anurag Banerjee, an angel investor and director at Ozonetel.

Using Ozonetel’s speech recognition technology, businesses can market their services to rural population without having to worry about the education level of such target audiences, while urban audience can use it to go respond to the IVR prompts without keeping the phone away from the ear to look at the keypad and feed in digits.

“Compared to Google and Apple’s Siri, our speech recognition tech seems to be quite a basic solution. But, our approach to speech is to make it easily available to the end users without them knowing how speech recognition works. We will be rolling out multiple domain-specific word packs for cities, states, grocery, banks, insurance etc,” he said.

Bootstrapped and profitable, Ozonetel registered a top line of Rs 22 crore in the last financial year, and is trending towards Rs 80 crore by the end of March 2016.

“We are beginning to explore some parts of Africa, the Philippines and Indonesia, where we are planning to do a couple of pilots within a month,” Banerjee said, adding that the company was projecting around two million voice-to-text transactions in the next one year.