Afraid of passwords and PINs being stolen? An Indian startup unleashes the power of voice biometrics

Photo credit: Adrianna Calvo

We live in a powerful age. When the machines around you – and I’m not just talking smartphones – turn into organic creatures.

They can hear you, understand you, and decipher your emotions, just like humans can. But how do they do that? How do watches, televisions, refrigerators, cars – all inanimate pieces of machinery – get you so well?

Much of it has to do with speech recognition.

That is just the tool Indian startup Uniphore Software Systems has been wielding to wow global businesses.  The seven-year-old firm, incubated at IIT Madras, has been helping their call centers up their game by understanding their customers better.

Not just that. In an age when passwords and PINs hold the key to important information, but are in constant danger of being leaked, stolen, or forgotten, it also unleashes the power of voice biometrics.

“As a species, we like to talk. Any customer service will be seriously hampered if it does not have the voice channel,” says co-founder Umesh Sachdev.

Focused on the business-to-business (B2B) segment, it has 70 enterprise customers across the globe and has served over 4 million end users till date.

With 100 employees in India, the Philippines, and the UAE, it was ranked the 10th fastest growing tech company in India by Deloitte Fast 50 last year. “We build platforms that can help communicate with machines through the spoken word,” says Umesh.

Harnessing the power of speech

Uniphore founders Ravi and Umesh

Headquartered at the IIT Madras Research Park in Chennai, the company was founded by Umesh and Ravi Saraogi in 2008.

“If automation is to become a part of customer engagement, machines should understand, process, and respond to human speech,” says Umesh, who had earlier co-founded Singularis Technologies.

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