Uniphore's Voice

There are many factors that contribute to Uniphore’s fast growth and innovative solutions: we work with groundbreaking technologies, we have strong partnerships with industry leaders, and we truly understand our customers. However, the single most powerful factor that differentiates our business is our people. Uniphore encourages creativity and hard work, which brings in a dynamic combination of seasoned veterans, inventive intrapreneurs, and tech-savvy college grads. In this post, you’ll get an insight into Uniphore by hearing from one of our employees, Parthasarathy Krishnaswamy, in his own words.

Parthasarathy Krishnaswamy

Position: Senior Project Manager
Total experience: 20 years
Degree: Computer Science, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore

What is your passion?
Computers. I’ve been with computers since 1987. I remember being in biology class and they made us draw all these pictures – and I just really hated it because my handwriting was so terrible. So I figured out that typing was a lot easier than writing, and I decided that I better do something with that. I started typing, and I just haven’t stopped. Plus, computers were really catching on in India in the late 80s, so it was the right time to become an expert on them. Ever since then, computers are what I know and what I love.

What were you doing before you joined Uniphore?
I was at Citibank in New York for the last 10 years, working as the Assistant Vice President of the Investment Banking division. I was mainly into java programming — hard core java programming! I worked on creating systems for project management, where I designed a dashboard to keep a macro view what was going on. I also worked with asset management, collaborating with a team to see how we could save costs after the crash in 2008.

Why did you decide to join Uniphore?
I’ve always had this thing where I wanted my work to directly contribute to the development of India. On some level, I could contribute financially by sending money back from the U.S. But coming back and participating more directly was something I’ve always wanted to do. So I came here and I met Ravi and Umesh (Uniphore’s co-founders) and told them about my goals. They knew Uniphore could enable me to achieve them.

I think that people can participate part time in the development of this country, or they can do it full time. I wanted to take it on full time. So now I play a direct role in moving India forward, especially rural India, and this gives me a lot of job satisfaction.

What are you working on now?
Sub-K, what else? (Sub-K is Uniphore’s largest customer in the financial inclusion sector). Financial inclusion through mobile voice banking is a very new concept, so the product is still evolving. This means that we’re still in development mode, working to integrate with all the new banks coming on board. Eventually this will reach a saturation point, and we’ll move into maintenance mode. But for now, Sub-K continues to give us the business requirement, and then we provide the technical designs and offer suggestions and guidelines for implementation. We work with them on a day-to-day basis to monitor the progress of the solutions, and the evolution towards reaching targets.

What has been most rewarding about your Uniphore experience?
Working for rural India. As I mentioned, that’s why I took the job. I think you’ve really got to be proud of what you’re doing, and when I watch the video of Vijay Mahajan demonstrating the impact of our high-tech solutions on small village entrepreneurs and communities, I feel very proud.

How did your background or previous work experience prepare you for your current role?
Working in the financial industry gave me insight into banking processes and their technology infrastructure. This helped me to understand how we could integrate Uniphore’s solutions with the banks. But there are also major differences between my previous work at Citibank and my current work. When I worked in NY, for example, there was a huge bureaucracy – so getting anything done took a long time. But at Uniphore, I am able to define our processes, so we get things done quickly and on our terms. That’s the great thing about working at a startup.

It’s important that I thank my team, because they really helped me adjust in moving from one extreme of financial services at Citibank to the other extreme of enabling financial inclusion in an Indian startup. Their inputs and support were really important in making my adjustment comfortable and smooth.

What is the most challenging project you’ve worked on at Uniphore?
Moving our data server from Chennai to Hyderbad. CTRLS is the only Tier IV Data Center in India. It has been operating at 100% uptime for its 4 years in running, and it ensures application uptime and security moving. Uniphore wanted to guarantee our customers that we have the highest quality data server, so we chose to migrate to CTRLS from our previous data center. To do this, we had to move all the applications that were developed in the last couple of years. This involved coordinating with a lot of different people, getting certificates from different vendors, etc, etc. My team was probably here from 9am to 1am every day during that one month. But the good news is that it was worth it. Our systems have had a 99.95% uptime since we migrated, compared to industry standards of 95%.

What is the best piece of career advice you can offer IT people embarking on a technical career at Uniphore?
I would make sure to explain the complete supply chain with which Uniphore works. They should know that the end customer is often a villager, someone who has never had access to these products and services before. I think that he should have an understanding of the end customer as someone who really depends on our technology, and then he will feel motivated to do his best work always.

I would also tell a new person to try to envision their career growth at Uniphore. If they are proud of the work they are doing, they we will be successful, the money will come, and we will all grow together. Success is more than just a salary, its about taking pride in the work and the company. Doing these things will bring rewards.

What are most people like at Uniphore?
Everyone at Uniphore is easy to work with and easy-going. Starting with Umesh and Ravi, these qualities trickle all the way down through the company. That’s the culture of Uniphore. And like I mentioned before, Uniphore is a very supportive place. My team has been really encouraging in helping me to adjust to the Indian work culture.

Ok, last question. What’s the most interesting thing about you?
I make it a point to go to Disney every year. I love that place, because when you go, you become a kid again. A few years back, I went to the Grand Canyon in the U.S., and I thought: ‘It’s just a lot of rocks.’ Nothing as good as Disney. So this year I’m going to the Disney in Hong Kong with my family.

Speaker Recognition using Voice biometrics In the field of enterprise mobility, Uniphore stands out for our guarantee to provide fully secure solutions. One way we accomplish this is through Voice Biometric technology, which authenticates the identity of the user by validating their unique voiceprint. Using nothing more than their mobile phone, users engage with this technology to securely access and enter personal information as well as transact.

To assure that we are consistently offering the most sophisticated Voice Biometric-based solutions, Uniphore has partnered with several global leaders in the field of speech technology. For our commercial deployments of Voice Biometrics, we work with Nuance, the leading provider of speech and imaging solutions around the world. To conduct proactive R&D on speech technology, we’ve teamed up with IIT-Madras. This latter partnership has enabled us to create critical Intellectual Property in Voice Biometrics, and develop commercially ready solutions that are today used for a variety of applications, including financial transactions at the bottom of the pyramid.

In this post, we want to give you an inside view of some of the R&D work we’re doing on Voice Biometrics, and the insights we’ve gained in the process. This post was written by Swetha Bharathi, one of our interns who is currently pursuing her M.S. in Speech Technology at IIT-M.

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Swetha:

Voice Biometrics is a ground-breaking technology, and one that is relatively new to the market. Therefore, one of the key focus areas of our R&D team is to develop standardized recommendations and technological designs, which can be used as common evaluation criterion by buyers and regulatory authorities. Over time, these criteria will go on to define standards in the global Voice Biometrics industry, enabling large-scale adoption and open access to developers.

To use the voice biometric system, every user must enroll by registering their ‘voiceprint,’ – a combination of pitch, frequency, tone, etc. – that is as unique to them as their fingerprint or their iris scan. Combined with the user’s private passphrase, the voiceprint is used thereafter to verify their identity and give them access to Uniphore’s application.

However, sometimes users are denied access to an account that is legitimately theirs – an error known as a ‘false negative.’ Though these mistakes don’t happen often, we are quickly working toward achieving a False Rejection Rate of less than 3%. This goal will be achieved through fine-tuning the core-technology, the application design, the User Interface, and the various elements of adoption optimization.

For example, one variable that we are currently testing is handset variation. In practice, we found that some of the users who enroll with a certain model of handset, but attempt to verify their identity with a different model, are facing troubles in authentication. We conducted several experiments in which we enrolled different users on various handset models and monitored the performance of each voiceprint. The data we gathered led us to conclude that the effect of handset variability is caused by acoustic characteristics and speech transformations imposed by different handsets. (Contrary to popular belief, different handset manufacturers have different sets of acoustic coding on voice.) The variations observed helped us to tweak the configuration parameters and the verification score, thus allowing inter-operability among the handsets without compromising the security. We are also currently developing an adaptation algorithm that will adapt the voiceprint to various handsets automatically, increasing the quality of verification even more.

Another factor that plays a role in the success of user authentication is the length of passphrase. By running controlled experiments on passphrases of different durations, we determined that a passphrase with a minimum of 1.5 seconds of length, 0.8 seconds of spoken inputs, and 5 syllables drastically increases verification performance. This study also led us to discover an entirely new parameter of Voice Biometrics, which we have labeled ‘Variance’. We can’t go into the details, but this concept has become our ‘secret sauce’ is truly defining how to optimally choose effective passphrases for verification. In fact, by analyzing thousands of speech samples collected on our platform, we were able to derive a proprietary mechanism for measuring Variance and use this to achieve a False Rejection Rate of less than 3% in lab conditions.

Both the type of handset and length of the passphrase are important factors in designing the most optimum passphrases for Speaker Verification systems. Given our research findings, we are creating a sophisticated list of usable passphrases, and consequently noticing a perceivable improvement in performance. Going ahead, we will focus on mathematically modeling how these various parameters together affect the performance using a multivariate analysis. As we develop new insights into this exciting technology, we’ll be keeping you posted through more blog posts and white papers.

Last week, the Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) hosted the India Digital Summit, where more than 700 delegates from business, government, NGOs and academia gathered to exchange knowledge, explore solutions, and celebrate achievements. The conference is one of the most prestigious events in the digital space, highlighting expertise and innovation on topics such as broadband for the masses, Mobile VAS, digital marketing, e-commerce, and much more.

One panel that particularly caught our interest was themed “The connected home: Device and Service Revolution.” During this discussion, R Sivakumar, Managing Director of Intel South Asia, spoke about the transition of peoples’ relationship to digital technology over time. He noted that: “Today the times has changed. It has evolved from connected homes to connected life.…In today’s era our devices are no longer wired and one can easily move outside the periphery of the house… This truly supports the idea of connected life.”

Uniphore couldn’t agree more. Indeed, we see the ‘connected life’ as the perfect metaphor for the vision that we are trying to achieve through speech-based technology. A decade ago, digital devices were a fixed component of people’s homes – something they interacted with in a certain place, for a specific task, at a particular time of day. But today, innovation and expanded offerings enable people to weave the benefits of digital technologies into all facets of their lives. Speech-based mobile applications play a unique and important role in enabling an entire ecosystem of products and services to reach all customers at all times, regardless of their physical location, the language they speak, or their literacy level. The combined information and transaction capabilities of speech-based mobile applications in Banking, Agriculture, Retail, Healthcare, Education, and other industries can come together to facilitate a ‘connected life’ culture. This is the future in which Uniphore is certain to play an important part.

Interestingly, Sanjay Trehan, Head of MSN India, Microsoft agreed with Sivakumar, but added that the security capabilities for such a ‘connected life’ are still in their early stages and must be developed. Upon the inception of Uniphore in 2008, we recognized this same need. For this reason, we place enormous importance in coupling our Multilingual Speech Recognition capabilities with Speech Biometrics – ensuring that the digital information and transactions that occur on our platform are secure and private.

One inspiring example of this movement towards a ‘connected life’ was highlighted during the India Digital Awards Ceremony, which recognizes exceptional companies that are playing a major role in the development of online and mobile VAS in India. This year, there were a record 1072 nominations across 33 awards. Against this tough competition, Basix Sub-K iTransactions Ltd, one our major customers, won 2 important awards: ‘Best use of Mobile for Social and Economic Development’ and ‘Best Digital Financial Inclusion Project.’

Sub-K, which means less than 1,000, has a vision of offering accessible, affordable and comprehensive financial solutions across India. Through a network called Basic Convenience Outlets (BCO), the company provides residents of rural, urban and semi-urban areas with access to services like banking, NREGA, utility payments, prepaid mobile pop-ups and others.

Uniphore is thrilled for Sub-K, as we see ourselves as integrally tied to the growth and success of their business. Indeed, Amit Mehta, the ED & CEO of Sub-K says: “Uniphore was a true partner right from day one, when we conceptualized this. A lot of the credit from where we are today goes to Uniphore. They stood by us on the technology and the vagueries.”

Particularly, Mehta notes that Sub-K’s success to date in achieving their financial inclusion milestones is critically linked to Uniphore’s sophisticated offerings. “Uniphore is unique because they help us manage other languages, while others have trouble with that. Nobody else has that infrastructure to do that,” he says. Together, Uniphore and Sub-K play an important role in enabling a ‘connected life’ for Sub-K clients, allowing customers to manager their money in a constant, convenient, and secure manner.

Just 3 years ago, Uniphore Software Systems was launched.

Before we got started, our founders were working with IIT-M’s Rural Technology and Business Incubator to understand the demands of mobile users across the socioeconomic pyramid in India. After months of research and field work, we had an in-depth understanding of the gap between the information and services demanded on mobile phones, and those that were available. We knew that we could play a role in bridging that divide by creating innovative mobile applications in local Indian languages to enable seamless, safe business connectivity with mobile users.

Today, there are already 1/2 million people interacting with our technologies every day.  Clearly, there’s been a lot going on.

We’ve been working with industry leaders in telecom, voice technology, and mobile applications. We’ve been expanding the boundaries of speech recognition to cover additional Indian languages and dialects. We’ve been improving speech biometrics systems to enable robust authentication for mobile users across the socioeconomic pyramid. We’ve been integrating our voice applications with other mobile capabilities, like SMS and GPRS.  And we’ve been developing our solutions to fit the needs of new industries.

Now, we’ve decided, it’s time to start sharing all this excitement with a broader audience. We’re launching our blog so that we can regularly communicate the stories behind the innovation, and get your ideas and feedback. We’re hoping to provide a personal, ongoing account of the solutions that we’re developing for transforming business operations and enabling seamless enterprise mobility.

As time goes on, we’ll use our blog to communicate with you from all sides of Uniphore. Our engineers will share insights on how they overcome technology challenges, our CEO will impart his vision for the power of mobile applications with IVR and speech biometrics to revolutionize business, and our COO will tell the tales of driving the culture of an innovative tech startup.

We also look forward to partnering with our customers to get out the word about their innovative new services, powered by our technologies. And we’ll join the dialogue of industry thought leaders who are exploring the future of secure and personalized mobile solutions.

We encourage you to be an active part of “Uniphore’s Voice,” and help us build a community that is as excited about speech-based mobility solutions as we are.