Ozonetel is Voice Telephony Partner For IIIT-H’s Project Crowdsource

Ozonetel, provider of on-demand cloud communication/telephony solutions, has recently been appointed by Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIIT-H) – Hyderabad’s Centre of Excellence, as a Voice Telephony partner, to crowdsource 2000 hours of Telugu speech from Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.  Through this initiative, IIIT-H aims to give users access to personal digital assistants like Alexa, Siri that can use AI-enabled speech recognition in Telugu. Post completion of this project users can converse with their personal digital assistant in Telugu as well along with Hindi and English.

There is a scarcity of voice data sample in the databases for regional languages like Telugu. To address this challenge, IIIT-H has launched this pilot with a set of volunteers. The team will work with academic institutions in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana to collect at least 2,000 hours of spoken content in Telugu in the next one year. The aim is to crowdsource speech from different regions of both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh to include the diversity of language which is spread across the region. Around ₹1 crore has been earmarked for the project.

As a voice telephony partner, Ozonetel is providing its highly efficient interface KOOKOO platform to collect data from volunteers. Through the KOOKOO platform volunteers can access speech links and record conversation. Ozonetel is helping IIIT-H in building chatbots, voicebots and WhatsApp integration to allow data collection through various channels.

Speaking about this partnership, Chaitanya Chokkareddy, Chief Innovation Officer, Ozonetel, said, “We are thrilled to be joining IIIT-H in this landmark project. In a country with numerous dialects, AI penetration is limited owing to varying speech patterns and languages. Being a leader in the AI-powered cloud communication space, we at Ozonetel, are working closely with IIIT-H to further the power of AI in the country.”

“Through this association, we aim to use our expertise and provide our KOOKOO platform to help enable devices embedded with AI-based speech recognition technology, operational in regional languages like Telugu.” He further added.

Commenting on this, Prakash Yalla from IIIT’s Technology Transfer office said, “As a voice telephony partner, Ozonetel is providing its highly efficient interface KOOKOO platform to collect data from volunteers. Through the KOOKOO platform volunteers can access speech links and record conversation. Ozonetel is helping IIIT-H in building chatbots, voicebots, WhatsApp integration to allow corpus collection through various channels.”