Ubona is a 2008 recession born startup that spurred the speech recognition automation revolution in India back in the time when India never had a home-grown speech recognition automation startup. Today, it is on its way to become a 100 crore company. Jyotirmoy Chakravorty, Founder and CEO, Ubona Technologies, shares his company’s vision and future growth plans
Some edited excerpts:
What problems does Ubona Technologies solve?
Ubona Technologies solves the communication problem of the enterprises to their customers in a personalised and effective manner. Simply put, Ubona enables customer facing enterprises to revolutionise their customer experience managing their services by automating contact center use cases. Ubona’s first of its kind solution enables enterprises to scale up their customer reach by interacting with their customer through multimedia, streamline operations and save costs.
A major differentiation of Ubona’s solution is that it is built based on guided state tracked and intelligent multimedia bot, a one of its kind technology in India. It is built with a host of technologies to create a personalised and end to end orchestration of technologies to meaningfully and quickly implement the use case which is required by the enterprise. In other words, Ubona’s technology aims at enabling people to effectively interact with what they see.
How did you come up with the idea of starting a speech recognition solutions based startup?
The idea of starting Ubona started while I was working with July Systems where the focus was on creating mobile phone applications for the users which was other than voice. Having opportunity to interact with network operators from across the world gave me deep knowledge on limitations of developing applications for the mobile phones of those days as they came with no memory space. While it was thought that there is no practical application other than the voice or SMS is possible at that time, I strongly believed that the best experience could be created with solution that enables the customer to get his job done with a vocal instruction over a phone call. I along with two co-founders Umesh Singhal and Vishal Lal started Ubona which became India’s first speech recognition company. At Ubona, we aimed at creating an innovative medium that enables consumers to discover and interact with the world of services around them, even by using a simple phone.
Recession hit the country soon after you started Ubona. How did you manage to succeed despite such challenging times during Ubona’s initial period?
The 2008 recession was one of the biggest challenges we conquered successfully despite the fact that it had not been too long since the company was founded. While we worked on solutions for ticketing, stock trading and many more, we had to get back to the board to chalk out a new plan to survive the downturn. We focused on the telecom space and worked with network operators helping them in with inbound customer acquisition even during the economic downturn. Ubona Song Catcher, one of its kind speech recognition solutions that allowed users to have their favourite song as ring back tone on the go by either saying the name of the song or by recording it. Ubona Song Catcher became one of the most successful inbound customer acquisition channels for India’s leading network operators during the time when the country was under an economic slump.
With time speech recognition emerged as a dominant way for mobile phone interaction. Ubona also because of its association with the technology emerged as a company capable of providing the best experience of interaction and effectiveness for the consumers.
What makes you confident of reaching the 100 crore club soon?
Ubona’s solutions are deployed by some of India’s large enterprises from various sectors that are expected to witness growth. These include large private banks, insurance companies, e-commerce businesses, and many more. There is a scope for expansion for Ubona Technologies as the requirements of giant customer-facing enterprises are expected to grow. Our attention is currently on scaling up as our solutions have demonstrated our capabilities and enterprises have witnessed success with our solutions. New enterprises are also adopting our solution at a great speed. The success provided to our existing client has created a huge goodwill in the market and is working as a big sales pull for us. We have already seen an increase in our revenues and it is expected to grow further this year. All these factors make us confident of hinting that Ubona will reach the 100 crore club by mid of 2023.
What are the key focus areas for Ubona Technologies for the year 2023?
While we have been working on implementing the use cases for the customers implementing for call centres, we are now in the process of transforming ourselves as a complete communication provider. By complete communication provider we mean that we help enterprises with all the communications requirements. We are aiming to offer a comprehensive communication solution that is tailored to client needs. Our customers currently have massive requirements which we are aiming at addressing their needs in a holistic way.
We are successful in the use case approach and we will transform into a complete communication solution company on the cloud. In order to facilitate all business communications with customers in the manner desired by them, we would like to establish ourselves as a communication provider. Our key focus will be on the big customers to transform ourselves to become a complete communication solution provider implementing all the needs of the enterprises to communicate with their customers, such as use cases, call centre, speech analytics, messaging their customers and many more. This is our new and bigger positioning of the company that will be our key focus for the year 2023.
We feel that the solutions, we are offering to the e-commerce segment will scale in other e-commerce segments. We are aiming at creating some new models with those solutions with our e-commerce companies by the middle of this year. In addition to these, we are aiming at expanding to other segments such as airlines, consumer electronics, real estate and other companies in the service industry where there is a need to communicate with the customer
