 "Umesh Sachdev")
A phone that can understand almost any language" has put an unassuming Indian entrepreneur on Time's 2016 list of "10 millennials who are changing the world". Umesh Sachdev, 30, shares this distinction with a record-setting American gymnast who was born to a drug addict mother, a daring cave explorer who travels to hidden underground "continents" and a young Syrian who, standing blindfolded at a public square in Berlin, became a YouTube sensation as he invited hugs to urge Germany to accept and trust refugees.
Sachdev's contribution to making services and information accessible to people living in remote areas and to those who cannot read or write is significant. His Chennai-based startup, Uniphore Software Systems, which he co-founded with his college friend, Ravi Saraogi, eight years ago, produces software that allows people to interact with their phones and access services by communicating in their mother tongue.
Uniphores products, which include a virtual assistant called Akeira that is able to process more than 25 global languages and 150 dialects, are today being used by over five million people in India and Asia.
Akeira has, in fact, replaced brokers in many small towns where stock traders now communicate with the virtual assistant, which provides advice on latest stocks and trends. Besides stock trading companies, banking and agriculture firms are also using the facility.
Sachdev and Saraogi were classmates at an engineering college in Noida, Uttar Pradesh. While Sachdev's father was chief executive at a Tata Group company, Saraogi hails from a business family.
Though both got good job offers after they graduated in the late 1990s, the two chose to launch a start-up, Singularis Technologies. Their technology, which was adopted by Bharat Sanchar Nigam and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam, helped track lost phones. But after operating the company successfully for two years, they didn't know how to scale up operations.
To resolve this conundrum, Sachdev and Saraogi met representatives from telecom companies, business analysts, government officials and engineers. Among them was Ashok Jhunjhunwala, a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M). Jhunjhunwala agreed to help them, provided they shifted to the IIT-Madras business incubator that was supporting and building start-ups with rural relevance.
In 2007, the two moved to Chennai and spent months doing research in rural Tamil Nadu. They soon realised that people wanted to use mobile phones to access personalised information, but they were not comfortable typing text messages. There appeared to be only one solution: a voice service. But there was another problem: language. It could not be only Hindi and English. It had to be in the local language and preferably, even in the local dialect.
As a pilot project, they set up a four-member call centre to provide information (available on the internet) to callers from three districts of Tamil Nadu. In a few days, they had clocked 10,000 calls.
The potential was evident but scaling was a challenge. They would need a workforce of at least 3,000 to meet the demand. For Uniphore, the solution was replacing men with machines.
It took the two friends a year to develop a working prototype, and within a month of it, they received seed funding of $100,000. During the early days, the team focused on using standard phones to allow users access to the services.
In 2008, after a year of testing prototypes in laboratories, they launched Uniphore. It designs and delivers speech-based mobility service applications to help connect businesses with their customers and employees in real time.
Uniphore's first client was Thomson Reuters. Sachdev and Saraogi had read an article about a Thomson Reuters service, Reuters Market Life (RML), dedicated to farmers. "RML was planning to send updated market prices and weather data to farmers via SMS," recalls Sachdev, sitting in his office at the IIT-Madras Research Park, a tall concrete structure next to the lush green campus of the institute.
Having run pilot projects for farmers, the two believed that SMS was not the best means to communicate with them as the rural literacy rate was low. "This was the main reason why our focus was on speech and language recognition," says Sachdev. They reached out to the contact person for RML at Reuters through LinkedIn.
After several rounds of discussions and meetings over two months, RML became Uniphore's first customer. After RML, the farmers' financial inclusion project came in. And then there was no looking back.
Now, the company has over 70 clients - from agriculture, banking and aviation to BPO and telecommunication. Its solutions provide secure, personalised information in the local language to any low-end mobile phone. The technology supports 24 global and 14 Indian languages and integrates them with voice and text message follow-ups.
Take, for example, the voice-based mobile banking solution. When a customer calls, the system first authenticates his identity through voice biometrics. For this, Uniphore has created amVoice, a voice biometrics technology that assures user authentication by using the individual's unique voice-prints. The company says this reduces the costs and risks associated with authentication, which otherwise requires passwords or sharing of sensitive data. Once the voice is verified, the system engages the user in an interactive conversation to process the requested transaction.
While Akeira is also being used for Jan Dhan Yojana, the government's financial inclusion programme, Uniphore's flagship product, AuMina, is into speech analytics.
With time, Sachdev says they also intend to target healthcare, insurance and automobiles companies. More the users, better the margins, says Sachdev, adding that the company has been profitable from its second year of existence.
But research and development costs are high. To stay ahead in the game, Uniphore needs to keep adding languages and expanding its infrastructure. This is the reason why it invests 20 to 25 per cent of its capex in R&D.
Funding, however, has not been a problem. IIT-Madras Research Park helped it raise its first round of $100,000 from National Research Development Corporation in August 2008.
Last year, Infosys co-founder S Gopalakrishnan also invested in the start-up. "Uniphore's vision of solving human-machine interface challenges is very exciting," he says. "The company has already made substantial progress with its solution." The same year Uniphore also raised money from IDG Ventures and attracted a few other investors from Indian Angel Network and venture capital firms. The company aims to become a billion-dollar product venture from India within a decade.
Uniphore's revenue is around $10 million. The company claims it has been growing at 150 to 200 per cent over the last three years.
While Uniphore's base is in India, it has sizeable presence in the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia as well as in West Asia. It intends to soon enter America. Uniphore support Spanish, the largest spoken language, and its product also recognises many English accents.
The next exciting project is "Chinglish" (English with Chinese influence). The company has already experimented with this and is now also looking to tap the Chinese market.
The world is clearly Sachdev's playground.
