He sold his firm to Facebook and is now building voice tech for the world

Kumar Rangarajam's firm Slang Labs has pioneered the concept of voice assistant as a service (VAaaS), and aims to reduce thought to action latency among those coming online for the first time

In a house tucked away in JP Nagar, a posh residential area in south Bengaluru, Kumar Rangarajan is playing badminton. He has been regularly playing the sport and gymming at home during the pandemic for fitness. He has also converted a section of his house into an office where he runs Slang Labs, an in-app voice assistant company. While he is the a co-founder, his job title is ‘obsessive dictator’ of Slang Labs.

“I play badminton for one hour every day and don't think about work during that time,” says Rangarajan. “I have become healthier than I was before.”

In 2014, Rangarajan's startup Little Eye Labs became the first Indian firm to be bought by Facebook, going from creation to acquisition in less than 18 months. Little Eye Labs made a software tool for analyzing the performance of Android apps. After the acquisition, he worked for Facebook for over three years and moved to Menlo Park in the US, which is home to the headquarters of the social media giant and where Google and Round Table Pizza were founded. In 2017, he moved back to India along with other Little Eye Labs co-founder Giridhar Murthy, who had also worked for Apple Inc as a software engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Rangarajan and Murthy founded Slang Labs along with another co-founder Satish Chandra Gupta, a former engineer at mobility firm Ola, e-commerce giant Amazon and Microsoft Research.

“It sounds very cliched, but we wanted to be an Indian company and not start an American firm,” says Rangarajan, who has a Bachelor of Engineering from Anna University.  “The goal was to build something from India for the world. Typically you always use software from the West, but we want to build software in India which can be consumed by the West.”

Indeed, Slang Labs has pioneered the concept of voice assistant as a service (VAaaS). Rangarajan along with the other two co-founders started Slang Labs with the vision of reducing thought to action latency for the modern consumer that exists among app users today, especially those coming online for the first time. The co-founders zeroed in on multilingual in-app voice assistant as the way to make apps faster, easier and more accessible. The voice assistant enables people to transact and interact with the app by just talking to it in their own language. And for the app to talk back to them when required.

Initially, Rangarajan was impressed with Amazon’s smart speakers, with voice-activated AI assistant Alexa. It can perform various actions like turn off the lights and TV and play music and tell bedtime stories.

“It was love at first sight when I saw my kids use it,” says Rangarajan. “But we felt  Alexa was missing the game as it was focusing on devices.”

This is because commercial transactions for brands are taking place on apps and there are a lot of complexities there. Slang Labs is addressing that issue by using voice to make such processes easier, faster and more accessible to the people.

Over the past four years, Slang Labs’s technology has become the fastest and easiest way to embed an accurate voice assistant inside mobile and web apps. With many popular brands currently consuming their Slang in-app voice assistant, the 20 members strong Bengaluru-based startup is inching closer towards its mission of having a voice assistant inside every app.

As technology grows more pervasive in people's daily lives due to the ongoing Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, in-app voice assistant is a promising touchpoint for e-commerce and other interactions online. Through this technology, consumers will be able to do online transactions in their apps through the power of their voice, and in their preferred language. Slang Labs is supporting vernacular languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam.

“There are a lot of things about which we get frustrated when we use these apps out there,” says Rangarajan. “This is where we think voice-enabled applications can have the same level of impact that mobile was able to have on traditional e-commerce.”

A few big players such as Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart have also built such technologies, but Slang Labs is focusing on the vast majority of organisations that lack such capabilities. Its technology acts as a layer on top of the existing apps of the brands.

Apps are how consumers primarily connect and transact with the brands today, and in the foreseeable future. But customers of today and tomorrow (aka the next billion users) have a problem with using apps. They are intimidated by the English-only experience of it. They also face other complexities that come with the rigidity of a touch-only experience like typing on a small keyboard, not knowing how to get to a particular page, spelling mistakes, and others.

But for brands, making the app available in multiple languages or simplifying the user experience is a hard, costly, and time taking challenge.

Enabling multilingual voice-based interactions inside their apps, even if the visual language of the app continues to be in English, is an opportunity for businesses to easily solve these problems. The firm said businesses can quickly reach over 400 million users in tier 2 markets and beyond.

Slang in-app voice assistant is the flagship product of Slang Labs helping enterprises make their apps faster, easier and more accessible. The multilingual in-app voice assistant gets natively embedded inside the app as a multimodal overlay. It is allowing its users to transact with the app by just talking to it or by interacting with the visuals of the app directly. More importantly in their own language, even if the app’s visual language continues to be in English. 

Slang in-app voice assistant is built to understand the needs of different domains. It can easily be customised to suit the requirements of individual apps from a particular domain. The smart assistant abstracts out all the complex deep tech AI components (like automatic speech recognition (ASR), natural language understanding (NLU), text to speech (TTS), translations, the dialogue management system).

While voice user interface has always been popular in internet search and entertainment, the next big leap for voice UI will be in the conversational commerce market. Besides retail, the firm is also tapping other domains such as travel, recruitment, and BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance).

Slang Labs recently received an investment from the Google Assistant Investments programme, along with 100x Entrepreneurs, Velu Murugan, Thomas George and their existing investor Endiya Partners. With this development, Slang Labs became one of the first players in the In-App Voice Assistant space globally to be backed by Google.

The firm expects to have over 100 companies as its customers by the end of the year and hopes to expand globally. It is also working on other world languages such as Vietnamese and Thai.