Think different, think local 🤳

A few days ago, one of our team members was struggling to direct the delivery personnel to our office location via call. Unfortunately, both could not converse with each other because of the language barrier. He then passed over the phone to a colleague who knew the local language. In no time, he was able to guide the delivery partner to the location smoothly.

Language barriers are for real. 

The question is, can AI-assisted voice bots bridge the gap? 

India is currently the second-largest English-speaking nation – after the US – with about 125 million people (12 percent) of the population speaking English. But, it still does not suffice for all customers. 

Businesses are missing out on big opportunities by not supporting multilingual conversations.  

• 76 percent of consumers are more likely to purchase when help/information is in their native/own language
• 70 percent of customers are loyal to brands that support their local language
• 29 percent of businesses have lost customers because of not offering multilingual support

Banking on this opportunity is Reverie Language Technology . The company's voice suite supports English and ten other Indian languages, including Kannada, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bangla, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi, and Odia. It uses speech-to-text (STT), automated speech recognition (ASR), language detection, natural language understanding (NLU) and text-to-speech, among others, to build its chatbots. 

Recently, Reverie has partnered with Boonbox (a rural assisted commerce platform) to cater to the non-English speaking Indian community. AIM caught up with the cofounder of Reverie Language Technologies, Vivekananda Pani and Boonbox chief Ramachandran Ramanathan to understand their plans in building the multilinguistic bots from scratch. 

Read the complete story here . 

Check out the video below: 

Besides Reverie, other AI chatbot companies in India include Yellow.ai, Ameyo, Arya.ai, Haptik, Verloop.io, Skit (formerly Vernacular.ai) and others.

Universal Speech Translator 

Last month, Meta (formerly Facebook) launched Universal Speech Translator at its Inside the Lab event. This new AI tool offers real-time speech-to-speech translation across all languages. 

Check out Meta's machine translation journey here . 

Analytics India Attrition Study 2022

India's data science professionals' attrition rate is skyrocketing. According to AIM Research, the attrition rate for data science/analytics professionals stood at 28.1 percent in 2021, compared to 16 percent the previous year. 

The complete report on data science and analytics attrition by AIM Research will be available soon.

Startups, Apps & Tools

SuperGaming 

Launched in 2019, SuperGaming is a gaming publisher startup that develops casual computer games. This week, AIM caught up with the chief of SuperGaming, Roby John, to understand the challenges, opportunities, and technology to develop games. Read the complete story here . 

AWS Cloud Quest 

AWS Cloud Quest is an all-new 3D role-playing game designed by AWS Training and Certification to help people gain practical AWS experience. In this game, the learners must complete quests that build cloud skills and help citizens build a better city. It includes videos, quizzes, and hands-on exercises based on real-world business scenarios. Click here to enrol for free, available on AWS Skill Builder.

Pre Post SEO 

Pre Post SEO is one of the freely available tools online to check plagiarism, rewrite, paraphrase, text summarisation, etc. Check out the website here . 

AIM Videos 

Want to know what is happening in the MLOps universe? Check out our latest video on 'Bringing MLOps into Practice' below:

Research & Papers 

Andrej Karpathy Recreates a 33-year-old Deep Learning Paper

Tesla's director of AI, Andrej Karpathy, recently released a paper called ' Deep Neural Nets: 33 years ago and 33 years from now ' based on Yann LeCun's three-decade-old paper ' Backpropagation Applied to Handwritten Zip Code Recognition.' He reproduced the paper for fun and used this as a case study on the nature of progress in deep learning, where he concluded that the paper holds relevance today and will also hold ground 33 years later (2055).

Social media dialogues    

Article in Focus 

The Beginning of the End for Convolutional Neural Networks?

Over the years, ConvNets' popularity grew by leaps and bounds. It has been widely adopted for various industrial applications like recommender systems, natural language processing, etc. But, there are also several flaws. Some of these limitations are fundamental, pushing users to prefer other models over ConvNets. Read the complete story here . 

Why should AI & data science courses include business case studies?

According to IBM, finding and hiring staff with the right skills and experience is a painstaking process. Around 69 percent of organisations struggle to recruit quality candidates, an Accenture study showed. We took a close look at the computer science engineering, AI and data science courses curriculum in India, and found most universities and institutions are limited to core technical skills and lack business components. Read the complete story here . 

Event in Focus 

Microsoft DataNext

Microsoft, in collaboration with Analytics India Magazine, has launched a first-of-its-kind virtual summit, ' DataNext: Putting AI innovation into action .' The day-long digital event–scheduled for 22 March 2022– will discuss the latest digital transformation capabilities that help enterprises leverage data, analytics, AI, machine learning and emerging technologies to improve business outcomes.

You can register for the event here . 

Top News of the Week  

IndiaRxiv, a Repository for Research Preprints, Relaunched

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Number of AI Patents Increased 30 Times since 2015