Using Voice Authentication for Government Payments: from Philippines to India

Posted on May 15, 2012 by admin

Uniphore believes that the use of Voice Biometrics for mobile payments is the most secure, scalable method for offering banking and payment services to the Indian masses. While many are excited about our vision, we often get the question:  “Has a large scale deployment of Voice Biometrics for mobile money been successful anywhere before?” The short answer is: yes, in many countries around the world. Voice Biometrics has taken off with banks and merchants everywhere from Australia to Israel to Canada. Today, we’ll share with you one case study from the Philippines, where 1.5 million pensioners access their accounts using a voice-based mobile system. The information for this post was derived from the case study originally written by Opus Research.

The Government Service Insurance System (GSIS) of the Philippines is the primary pension program for about 1.5 million government retirees in the country. Beneficiaries were receiving these payments in the form of checks, mailed to their closest GSIS branch. However, the Philippines is an archipelago that consists of over 7,000 islands and travel to some remote towns can involve hours of travel and the use of planes, boats and automobiles. Consequently, the government found that pensioners struggled to access their payments, as they often lived a great distance from the bank branch.

Wireless carriers, however, had done an excellent job of extending their coverage areas across the islands, and thus extending the reach of electronic services beyond those that were be offered through brick-and-mortar branches or kiosks. Therefore, GSIS decided to adopt a mobile voice authentication system for pension payments, where pensioners could access their accounts and carry out financial transactions over their mobile phone, rather than travelling to the GSIS offices and kiosks.

To enroll, pensioners need to present their GSIS ‘eCard Plus’ to an authorized representative in a GSIS enrollment center. They then have to create a unique voice signature by recording and storing their voice data. After enrolling, pensioners can call up the GSIS hotline on a toll-free number, and state their 11-digit ID number. The system authenticates the caller’s voice by matching it with the stored voice signature. As soon as they system recognizes the caller, they can apply for loans and carry out other transactions with GSIS over the phone. All transactions require four-digit PIN as a second layer of authentication.

Today, the voice-based system has almost entirely replaced check-based pension payments in the Philippines. Pensioners can access their account from any location and at any time, and they can carry out financial services in a hassle-free way. The system has also eliminated fraud from the system, as a person’s voice cannot be stolen or mimicked to the level of fooling the system.

In India, the government spends about Rs. 3,00,000-crore in welfare benefits – subsidies, payments and special schemes – every year. Following the Philippine model, the government can ensure that these payments are sent securely and efficiently. By directly transferring these benefits to the beneficiaries and enabling them to access these funds over a basic mobile phone, the government can eliminate the high levels of fraud that currently exist in the system and overcome the infrastructure barriers to delivery.

 

 

 

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Trends in Adoption of Enterprise Mobility in India

Posted on May 1, 2012 by admin

This week, NASSCOM Emerge featured Uniphore as a key player in the emerging Enterprise Mobility market in India. The feature was part of NASSCOM’s focus on the enterprise mobility landscape as a whole, in which they interviewed businesses, analysts, and developers about the different types of mobility, as well as the most pertinent trends, and the important success stories.

One of the prominent articles in this mobility issue was an interview with Katyayan Gupta, Lead Mobility analyst at Forrester, on what’s driving Mobility Adoption among companies and consumers in India. When discussing B2C mobility models, he claims that the reason these solutions haven’t taken off is 2-fold:

  • The lack of a product innovation roadmap: According to Gupta, with Indian companies, innovation tends to stop after the initial success, so sustainable success stories are few and far between.
  • High price points: Since Indian customers prefer free downloads and are typically hesitant to use credit cards online, this tends to dampen the domestic demand.

While we agree that addressing these two points are necessary conditions for enabling sustainable enterprise mobility solutions for B2C companies, they are not by themselves sufficient. Our experience teaches us that the most vital inhibiting factor in this market is actually usability.

There are three three major components of the usability issue in mobility applications:

  • Illiteracy & language barriers: Since about 40% of India’s population is illiterate, and many more are semi-literate, they are not comfortable with any kind of text-based communication. This means that most data and SMS-based applications won’t naturally appeal to them. Furthermore, most mobility applications are currently available in very few languages (like English & Hindi), limiting the ability of people to interact in their local languages.
  • Unintuitive applications: Very often, even those who do have smartphones find that current mobility applications are not intuitive or convenient enough to use. For example, we recently had a conversation with the a leading bank in India who revealed that of his 5 million customers active using internet banking, less than 0.2 million actually use their mobile banking application.

To answer these usability challenges, Uniphore believes that voice technology must play a role in B2C enterprise mobility applications. Speech-based applications by themselves can be used by anyone, regardless of literacy, connectivity, or phone type. These applications are also very intuitive to users, whose natural interaction with a phone is speaking. In other situations, we have found that combining speech technology with other platforms, such as SMS, USSD, and data, creates the most customer-friendly applications, as users can choose which mode they prefer to use in different contexts.

Continuing to speak about adoption, Gupta also discussed the fact that the most successful providers of enterprise mobility solutions in India till date are large companies like IBM, Tech Mahindra, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. However, we’ve seen that these large IT players typically don’t serve the SMEs in India, who can only afford 100INR per user per month budgets. To enable these businesses to reach out to their customers efficiently, we believe that the innovation will come from small and medium sized tech companies, particularly start-ups with an edge in technology (like ourselves). Furthermore, because these SMEs cannot typically afford the hardware involved in building reliable and robust mobility applications, the continual emergence cloud-based mobility solutions will drive down prices and enable adoption.

Together, these innovations in price, platforms, and interface can break down the barriers in B2C enterprise mobility and enable large-scale, sustainable adoption in India.

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Happy Birthday to Uniphore, from Ashok Jhunjhunwala

Posted on April 17, 2012 by admin

Uniphore marches ahead as it approaches its fourth anniversary… On April 23rd, Uniphore celebrates its fourth birthday. So far, our journey has been spectacular: we’ve developed sohpisticated insights into what makes speech technology work across languages and geographies, we’ve won loyal, prestigious customers, and we’ve gained international acclaim for our unique applications. For these successes, we owe abundant thanks to many, many people. But the person to whom we are perhaps most grateful is Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala, who chairs the Rural Technology and Business Incubator(RTBI) at IIT Madras and the Mobile Payment Forum of India. Dr. Jhunjhunwala is also a Director on the Board of the State Bank of India, a Board member of various prestigious companies including Polaris, Sasken, and NRDC, and a representative on the Prime Minister’s Setup Scientific Advisory Committee.

Amidst his busy schedule, Professor Jhunjhunwala has devoted his passion, expertise and insights to our growth from when Uniphore was in its most nascent concept stages through today. Therefore, we can think of no better to person author our birthday blogpost. Here’s what he has to say:

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In India, the speed of mobile penetration is 10 times faster than PC penetration, and it is expected to reach one billion by 2014. I fervently believe that as mobile phones become available to almost every family in India, it will trigger the transformation process that India has been waiting for, and provide the rare opportunity to leapfrog years of poor infrastructure development and bypass geographical constraints. However, in order to capitalize on this opportunity, enterprises, NGOs and governments need to utilize every capability of the mobile phone.

Until now, there has been significant emphasis on the data communication capabilities of mobile phones and the large number of differentiated services that can be built using these channels. While this is important, the true potential in India will only be realised when an equal emphasis is placed on building services using voice communication. Since about 40% of India’s population is illiterate, and many more are semi-literate, they are not comfortable with any kind of text-based communication. However, if such services are delivered to them using voice and in local language, the game is changed.

Mobile phones are designed for easy voice communication, irrespective of language being spoken. Speech recognition can thus take advantage of this natural and intuitive mode of communicating by creating human-like call flows on applications. Furthermore, the mobile channel allows companies to identify users through Calling Line Identification, or CLI, which recognizes the SIM card being used for making the call, as well as location based services, which identify the location of the phone within 50 to 250 meters. Here, voice technology can again add significant value, as Voice Biometrics can authenticate the unique identity of the caller (not just the phone). Therefore, together, speech recognition and voice biometrics on the mobile phone can take secure information and transactions to the last mile in a way in which no other channel is capable.

This is why I believe in Uniphore. Launched as an incubatee of RTBI, the company has spent the last four year using speech recognition and voice authentication engines to build robust applications on the mobile platform. Since these voice engines are still quite rudimentary, and by themselves have high rates of error, the efforts behind creating quality applications are enormous. Through unwavering dedication and long hours, I’ve been a witness to the innovative and skillful techniques that Uniphore has developed to cover up these deficiencies and deliver solutions that are reliable, dependable, and natural to the end user. The team has been able to achieve this because of the culture ingrained within the company, which emphasizes continual learning, experimenting, and collaboration. I am proud that IIT Madras is one of their collaboration partners in these efforts.

In order to foster holistic development, mobile applications are needed to provide services in all walks of life. Uniphore has done a creditable job in building applications in financial services, agricultural services, sales and distribution services and healthcare services. They recognize the opportunities of voice to extend the outreach of businesses in all industries, and are working diligently to develop appropriate, cost-effecitve solutions for each sector. With only four years under their belt, Uniphore has made remarkable progress building a business around revolutionary technologies, taking on the task of educating customers about the capabilities of voice, as well as leading the technological sophistication of voice-based applications. As a company which has delivered meaningful solutions to businesses while maintaining a commitment to developing inclusive technologies that can be deployed pan India, it has a huge potential, both in terms of making a difference to the society as well as building an excellent and profitable enterprise. Congratulations to its founders, its leaders and its employees as they march to their fourth anniversary. The future is theirs…

Ashok jhunjhunwala

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Uniphore’s Latest mHealth Launch in the News

Posted on April 3, 2012 by admin

Last week, Yourstory.in wrote about an important outcome of our latest deployment in mHealth: overcoming illiteracy as a barrier towards receiving critical health-related information. You can see the original article here.

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Finally, Breaking Down the Illiteracy Barrier in mHealth

Mobile Health has come very far, very fast in India. In just the last few years, mHealth initiatives have taken off, including awareness programs, remote monitoring, training for healthcare workers, and diagnostic and treatment support. In fact, PwC recently reported that mHealth will be a Rs 3,000 crore market in India by 2017.

But the industry had hit a wall when it came to the 25% of Indian people who are illiterate, and can’t interact with text or app-based services. This major portion of the population requires a solution catered to their needs, and one that works in the way they are most comfortable interacting with mobile phones. The logical answer is voice, a universal human asset that can be used to ubiquitously access people across India, regardless of their literacy or language skills. 

In Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, this obstruction to progress is particularly flagrant, as these states have very low literacy levels and significant rural populations with limited access to quality healthcare. Determined to break through this barrier, World Health Partners works with speech technology provider Uniphore Software Systems to deliver an information portal that health workers and clients can utilize through spoken conversation. By having an interactive dialogue with the system in their native language, they are able to learn more about their health and determine the best path for treatment.

“The team at Uniphore is working hand in hand with World Health Partners to develop and deploy solutions that work in low-resource settings, are cost-efficient and user friendly,” said Kamal Talreja, head of Technology at World Health Partners.

The solution is radical but straightforward. For example, when a woman is experiencing abdominal pain, she can call the system and report it. It will then ask her a series of questions about her medical history and other symptoms, getting a complete profile of her condition so that it can prescribe her with the appropriate solution. The Speech Recognition that powers the system resembles a human-like conversation similar to one that the woman would have with a doctor or nurse, making her as comfortable as possible. It’s also personalized to her local language and dialect.

“Numeric literacy in rural areas is much higher than alpha literacy, and sending and receiving messages is not a part of the culture. Therefore, interactive voice recognition solutions are most appropriate for clients living in these areas rural areas, primarily for their ease of use and convenience,” says Talreja. “We are happy to associate with Uniphore for the voice solution, as it is critical to reach the maximum number of people and collect more effective data about our target population.”

For health workers and clients, this service involves nothing more than a phone call. But on the backend, World Health Partners works with Uniphore to create a robust database of information, where they store important information about symptoms, diseases, medicines, and clinic locations.

Ravi Saraogi, Uniphore’s Co-founder and COO, expressed his enthusiasm for supporting World Health Partners in achieving their mission, saying: “Uniphore is proud to partner with innovative organization. We’re confident that using voice will help enable them to scale their impact to people and places in great need.”

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The Value of Incubation

Posted on March 20, 2012 by admin

This weekend, Uniphore was awarded the Best Incubatee in the ICT Category at ISBA Awards 2012. Below, CEO & Co-founder Umesh Sachdev reflects on the benefits of Incubation as a startup, and shares his insights on Incubation trends in India.

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India is known as the land of the unwavering entrepreneurial spirit. It runs in our blood.

The Registrar of Companies (RoC) indicates that Bengaluru is seeing 800 new tech startups every 6 months, and Chennai around 600. These entrepreneurs come in every shape and size, but all are excited by the prospect of doing something on their own – whether it be creating an impact, generating large wealth, or striking fame – the fruition of which is embodied by poster boys of India Inc, such as Dhirubhai Ambani, Sunil Bharti Mittal, N R Narayanmurthy and more recently Naveen Tewari (InMobi), and Sachin and Binny Bansal (Flipkart).

Six years ago, Ravi Saraogi and I joined this race with our first startup, Singularis Technologies. We thought we’d figured out the largest gap in the rapidly growing telecom industry: lost phones! By using a complicated algorithm on networks we were able to locate mobile phones within a region irrespective of the carrier network. In an effort to create a Fortune 500 company out of our few lines of code, we met with many stakeholders, analysts and gurus in the telecom industry to get their guidance. One of these people was Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala of IIT Madras, a famed board member of many illustrious corporates in the country including Tata Communications, Sasken, Tejas Networks, etc; as well as a key decision maker on Government committees in Telecom and Finance. Upon seeing our work, he immediately told us two things: 1) that what we had was a product, not a business (I wonder if others didn’t see it or were just too nice not to say it); and 2) our passion and persistence for our mobile product was glaringly obvious. He offered to mentor us personally, if we agreed to move to his Business Incubator at IIT Madras, which was supporting and building startups with rural relevance. This was our introduction to IIT-M’s Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI).

At RTBI, we saw the opportunity to use our understanding and passion of mobile technologies to solve a larger problem: access to content and services for the vast semi-literate and illiterate Indian population. We embarked on an exciting journey to create Mobile VAS products using vernacular Speech Recognition and Voice Biometrics. It took us 12 months of prototyping in the lab, a tie-up with the global leader in speech technologies, guidance and validation from multiple academicians, seed level funding from an institutional investor, and hands-on mentoring by serial entrepreneurs, to create what has now become Uniphore Software Systems. Could any of these have been possible for two young engineering grads who had recently failed at their first stint at entrepreneurship? Not in our wildest dreams! Our successful steps on the Uniphore ladder owe major gratitude to the incubation support extended by RTBI.

RTBI is not a commonplace organization in India. These types of Business Incubation programs are strongest in the US, where there has been a fairly robust startup ecosystem for over 50 years, the most notable incubators/accelerators being Tech Stars Boulder, Y Combinator, Excelerate Labs, etc. These companies provide support in the form of management, mentorship, networks and contacts, access to investors, setting up governance structures, and regulatory support and compliance, amongst other things.

However, in India, incubation is a fairly new and less developed phenomenon, with most incubators being restricted to premier technical and management institutions. In the last 5-6 years, however, there has been a spurt of newer incubation models, such as Villgro Innovations Foundation, an incubator for market-based solutions to rural development, and The Startup Centre, an accelerator program for technology startups (similar to the Y-Combinator model).

In addition to our initial incubation with RTBI, we have also gained access to the Villgro Incubation program, and have closely witnessed the creation and growth of The Startup Centre. With insight into all three models, we’ve noticed the following 3 trends in the Indian Incubation space:

  1. All incubation programs are not created equal, and they often specialize in certain elements of business support. For example, while RTBI offers unparalleled networking in the government and telecom circles, Villgro has an enviable network of social enterprises and understanding of social business models.
  2. Most incubators insist on strong governance standards, so startups looking for this kind of nurturing must be prepared for this.
  3. Incubation is not a fail-safe for success. Incubatees often take it for granted that the incubator will bail them out of any precarious, business-threatening situation, and this dependence inhibits rather than fosters their growth.

This last point is particularly poignant. As comforting as it was to rely on the seasoned success of our incubators to guide us through the startup process, Uniphore also came to the hard realization that in the end, our company’s success or failure is in our hands, and no incubator can be responsible for either result. A smart incubatee is one who knows what incubator services can be leveraged for growth, but doesn’t completely rely on the incubator to drive the business forward.

Uniphore has recently been awarded the Best Incubatee in the ICT category at the ISBA Awards 2012. For me, this award is as much a testament of the commercial success of the company as it is a validation of our ability to leverage the best offerings of RTBI and Villgro.

Uniphore is one of several successful case studies – such as Webaroo (SMS Gupshup), IdeaForge, Hashcube, and Desi Crew (Rural BPO) – which have enabled the Indian Business Incubation ecosystem to demonstrate its value. These incubators are now beginning to attract investors, seasoned mentors, and large corporates as partners to select quality enterprises for their portfolios. All these players have recognized that the technologies and business models coming out of incubators are truly cutting-edge, but need strong networks to thrive. And although these incubators can’t guarantee the success of their incubatees, their support networks, technology, business development, and governance can help get any startup vet the right path.

 

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Mobile (Voice) for Development

Posted on March 6, 2012 by admin

In 2006, Iqbal Quadir gave a TED talk about the power of the mobile phone to end global poverty. He argued that “aid does damages: because it empowers authorities instead of people,” and he advocated for a new approach to development from below. Quadir believes that in order to enable inclusive development, the key is to allow marginalized populations to be productive participants in the economy. And because “connectivity is productivity,” the one tool that could make this happen was the mobile phone.

As founder of Bangladesh’s leading telecom operator, GrameenPhone, Quadir has good reason for this belief. In fact, according to the New Nation, “GrameenPhone has increased the country’s GDP by far greater amount that repeated infusions of aid.” Since founding GrameenPhone in 1997, Quadir has noticed that mobile phones not only connect the village to the world, but they also provide business opportunities and create a culture of entrepreneurship. These are integral ingredients for successful development.

Today, Quadir’s successes are part of a much larger movement known as Mobile for Development (M4D). Every year at the Mobile for Development conference, businesses, policy makers, and NGOs from over 30 countries gather to share their insights on the role of mobile phones in health, education, agriculture, financial services, governance and livelihoods.

At this year’s conference, we saw a lot of inspiring presentations. Text to Change demonstrated how text campaigns can improve the delivery of male circumcision for HIV Prevention Services, Eko discussed how they enable financial inclusion through mobile-based transactions, and SMSOne revealed how social networking through text can empower farmers and enhance their livelihoods. These were just 3 of over 50 examples of the various ways that mobile phones are changing the face of development.

All these innovations have created tangible impact on the lives of those who depend on these services. Indeed, text-based programs on the mobile phones have shown an amazing ability to improve outcomes as well as generate cost savings for organizations across industries working with the poor. But throughout these presentations, we repeatedly had three doubts running through our minds: literacy issues, language constraints, and connectivity limitations. In India, at least 25% of the people are illiterate, and many countries in the developing world have even higher rates of illiteracy. This eliminates the ability of these people to use SMS or GRPS applications. Literacy level is directly correlated to level of poverty, meaning that text-based services are not reaching the bottom 25% of Indian society. Second, in this country, about 4% of the population is English-literate, and these levels are again indicative of developing world patterns. Although some mobiles are local language-enabled, most are not, thus once again limiting the level and type of person that can be reached through text on their mobile. Finally, wifi connectivity is not available in many remote parts of India and the rest of the world, thus ruling out the use of GRPS applications in these areas. Again, those who live in the most rural areas without connectivity are usually those in the highest need of services. Together, these three factors limit the potential of text-based mobile applications to reach the last-mile, thus inhibiting the ability of mobiles to foster inclusive development.

This is where voice comes in. As the only commercial provider of Voice Biometrics and Multilingual Speech Recognition in the country, Uniphore took time to share the insights we have gained over the years about how voice can fill the gaps of many text-only Mobile for Development initiatives. First, voice is a universal human asset, so reaching out to people through voice eliminates the needs for literacy skills. Second, with Multilingual Speech Recognition, people can have interactive dialogues with the application in their local languages. (Uniphore currently has 11 Indian languages and over 100 dialects, and we’re quickly adding!). Lastly, in areas that lack connectivity, people can fill out information traditionally done on a GRPS applications through voice inputs, which is then converted in speech-to-text. During our presentation, we also explained how adding voice biometrics enables organizations to further their value offering to the end user, allowing them to not only access information, but also do transactions, whether it be a loan payment, ordering an agricultural input, or purchasing medicine.

At the end of our speech, we had at least 10 people come up to us and use the word “ground-breaking” (in one of many languages) to describe their reaction to our presentation. Indeed, most agree the voice is the next major step in achieving development outcomes through mobile phones. We’re excited to be part of the Mobile for Development movement, and to partner with many of these fabulous organizations to augment their existing workflows and amplify their impact through voice-enabled, inclusive development.

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The saga of an interesting Uniphorean

Posted on February 22, 2012 by admin

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.

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Speaker Recognition using Voice biometrics

Posted on February 7, 2012 by admin

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.

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Uniphore at IAMAI’s India Digital Summit

Posted on January 25, 2012 by admin

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.

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Original use of Uniphore’s VoiceNet wins mHealth Alliance’s 2011 Innovators Challenge

Posted on January 11, 2012 by admin

Uniphore recently received some very exciting news: VoiceNet, our innovative platform that enables people to exchange information and conduct transactions through speech on their mobile phones, was recognized by the mHealth Alliance and Rockefeller Foundation. Long-time champion and collaborator Ashok Jhunjhunwala, professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras and Chair of the Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI) at IIT, was selected as a winner of mHealth Alliance’s 2011 Innovators Challenge for his application of Uniphore’s VoiceNet platform. This challenge recognizes pioneering mobile health (mHealth) professionals who have used mobile technology in innovative ways to improve health systems and outcomes around the world.

Two years ago, Professor Jhunjhunwala was approach by NRDC (an enterprise of the Government of India) for guidance on how to enhance one of their most important rural outreach programs, the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS). This initiative combats malnutrition and improves maternal and child health through a variety of activities, including a supplementary feeding scheme. In addition to providing children with supplementary nutrition packets, the scheme monitors their weight to detect faltering growth and assess nutritional status.

However, the paper-based process of data collection that was being used in ICDS was hampering the success of the entire operation. The time it took to collect, record, and aggregate information from beneficiaries limited the possibility of accurate or timely interpretation. Furthermore, there was a high incidence of internal tampering with the data, causing a lot of incorrect analysis.

In brainstorming a solution, Professor Jhunjhunwala recognized that the target population for this program was mostly illiterate, so the solution would have to be voice-based and available in local languages. He turned to Uniphore for its unique capabilities in speech-based mobile applications. Together, Uniphore and RTBI collaborated to define and develop a customized solution for ICDS.

In addition to the requirement of multilingual speech recognition, we considered the following factors:

  1. ICDS is administered in rural areas, so the solution must enable remote data collection that is always online, despite limited connectivity
  2. To avoid falsification of data, user authentication through speech biometrics would be a critical part of the solution
  3. The system would be used by people with little tech literacy, so it should be easy to use and require little training
  4. In order to achieve a comprehensive perspective of the progress that ICDS was achieving, the mobile application must to be linked to an intelligent analytics tools at the backend
  5. ICDS is a huge program that is intended to serve rural populations across India, so we needed to build a platform that could easily scale across states and geographies without a significant increase in investment for the government

In a short time, Uniphore and RTBI developed a solution on our VoiceNet platform that met all of the above criteria. The application was introduced in the Anganwadi centers (rural healthcare outreach centers) in Madhya Pradesh, where ICDS drives its operations. The process is simple: After enrolling herself in our voice biometric system, a mother uses our application on her mobile phone to authenticate her identity and vocally enter information about her child’s health and the benefits she has received from ICDS. This data is immediately uploaded on a web portal, where the administrators view it in real-time. This web portal stores all the information regarding the child’s weight, supplementary nutrition packets received, immunization schedules, growth charts, etc.

The implementation of our solution had immediate and enormous impact: information was accurate, the process was transparent, and follow-up was immediate. The enhanced data collection process enabled better service delivery and more efficient operations.

The use of VoiceNet in ICDS was intended as a pilot initiative to examine the impact of such innovative technologies on rural development and welfare schemes.  But with the success and recognition that this pilot has received, Professor Jhunjhunwala is thrilled with the prospects of what will happen next:

“There are huge numbers of government programs dedicated to supporting the wellness and development of rural populations. In these areas, there are many different languages, and the literacy levels are limited. But despite all these challenges, voice is an omnipresent opportunity that we can use to effectively administer these programs.”

At the same time, Jhunjhunwala recognizes that this kind of technology is very new to many of its beneficiaries – and that this could present an obstacle to widespread dissemination and adoption. However, as he works with Uniphore to continue to develop the most user-friendly, accurate solutions, he is confident that people’s comfort level with the technology will exponentially increase.  “When they feel like they are talking to a human, not a machine, and when they know they can trust the system, it is then that we will win.”

Uniphore is honored to be a part of this journey with Professor Jhunjhunwala and RTBI. We’re excited to be at the cutting edge of innovation as well as social impact, forging the pathway for efficient, personalized service delivery through voice.

 

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