Dear Beerud ,
The following report which appeared in yesterday’s
BUSINESS LINE , would interest you since you feel challenged to convert
BHIM into a “ Voice Activated “ app ( in
many Indian languages , too ) , for ease of using for millions of illiterate
Indians
I hope your discussions with NPCI are progressing well
With regards,
Hemen
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Soon enough you’ll be able to talk to your computer or
phone to perform any task — right from creating a document to checking how much balance you have in your
account and it could be online retailer Amazon driving that transformation.
And you could do this in Bhojpuri
or even Tulu.
“Voice
is going to be one of the main interfaces in the way consumers will
consume digital services in the future,” Werner Vogels, Amazon’s Chief
Technology Officer, told BusinessLine in an interview, while acknowledging
that learning local languages such as Tulu, spoken by a relatively small
population in coastal Karnataka, is still a challenge.
“The cool thing is that we are on the verge of automatically learning these
languages. Languages like English were done with lots of humans involved
in training the system and vetting whether this indeed is the intent of the
language.
We are working on conversational
systems and one of the areas is how you can have digital systems learn
these languages with just tapes of the languages and make it an automated process,” Vogels said.
There are 9,606 languages in the world.
Only 230 of them are in western countries.
Vogels said with the help of automation, using speech to interact with computers would be
commonplace across the world and it will extremely important for countries such as India where millions of
people have never used digital interfaces such as keyboard and mouse.
“We really see for example for elderly
people as well as young people that voice is so
natural.
This is the natural
interface to access something.
However, all the other interfaces we’ve had until now,
have been driven by the capabilities of computers — through screen, keyboard
and mouse,” he said, adding that computer
systems and programs will have to be written with natural language interface in
mind.
The $136-billion Amazon is already ahead
of most other when it comes to natural language processing through a technology
called Alexa.
So far, Alexa has been limited to select products such
as Amazon’s personal assistant speaker called Echo.
Speech recognition tech
Last week, at a conference in San Francisco, Amazon
announced that the technology
behind Alexa would be open to developers who can create products using Amazon’s
Lex (speech recognition and natural language processing engine) and Polly
(text-to-speech engine).
He said these tools
will soon be available in India and more languages will be supported.
In developing nations, smartphones will be
the primary way of accessing digital services and voice will be the primary way
of interactions there, he
said.
Giving an example of The International
Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, he said the institute has built an
engine based on AWS where they can determine the best time to apply fertilisers
on small farms to maximise crop yields.
“To get this accessible to small farmers, who have
very basic phones, they built a system wherein farmers can call in and describe
their patch of land and machine learning tool gives them advice on what
fertilizer to apply at what time.
“ It reduced the fertiliser use by 90 per cent and
doubled crop yield,” Vogels said, adding that voice lets people use access
technology without any training.
Vogel said the company is extremely
bullish on India where it is growing extremely rapidly.
“Last year when Amazon Web Services
launched a region here in India (local data centres), we had 75,000 customers
at that time.
Now, nine months later we have 1,20,000 customers in
India. What’s the biggest driver here is the enterprises
moving to AWS.
There is no vertical that’s not making use of AWS in
India — examples include companies such as Axis Bank, Bajaj Financial Services,
Hotstar, Hungama,” he said, adding that the company is going beyond selling
server and storage space and looking at services such as IoT and analytics.
Vogels also complemented Indian
start-ups for being focused on sustainability instead of chasing million
customer target.
“Start-ups in India are radically
different from those in other places.
Indians have entrepreneurial spirit to build businesses for a lifetime and not
because they want to grab a 100 million customers are sell themselves, which is
the unicorn path we see with many start-ups.
Indian start-ups are looking at building sustainable business. How can I build
a business that’s good for me in the long term,” he said
(This
article was published on May 3,
2017)
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With Regards,
hemen
parekh
(
M ) +91 - 98,67,55,08,08
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