Hyderabad: Ozonetel has become part of IIIT-H’s project to crowdsource 2000 hour of Telugu speech.
The Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIIT-H) – Hyderabad’s Centre of Excellence recently has appointed Ozonetel as a voice telephony partner. The project will crowdsource 2000 hours of Telugu speech from Telangana and Andhra Pradesh,
IIIT-H’s project 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.
It aims to crowdsource speech from different regions of both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. And the project wants to include language diversity as it is 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, voice bots and WhatsApp integration to allow data collection through various channels.
“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,” said Chaitanya Chokkareddy, Chief Innovation Officer, Ozonetel.
“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 added.
“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,” commented Prakash Yalla from IIIT’s Technology Transfer Office.
“Ozonetel is helping IIIT-H in building chatbots, voice bots, WhatsApp integration to allow corpus collection through various channels,” added Yalla.