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Bengaluru-based Reverie Language Technologies, whose vision is to create language equality on the Internet, is in the market to raise Series B funding of $12 million for its next phase of growth, a top executive told BusinessLine.
The start-up has already raised $4 million in Series A funding from Aspada and Qualcomm Ventures in mid-2015 and counts Ola, Practo, BHIM, Vijaya Bank, Government eMarketplace, Reliance Jio and eNAM as its customers.
Voice-based service
In order to assist first-time internet users to adopt online services faster and more easily, Reverie has introduced Gopal, an Indic Voice Suite to power Chatbots and IVR (interactive voice response) solutions that companies can use for greater engagement with their customers. Gopal supports 12 Indian languages — Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Gujarati, Assamese, Odia, Punjabi as well as Indian English.
“By 2021, the country will have 750 million internet connected users, of which 540 million will be Indian language users. While 540 million users presents a massive opportunity for businesses, Indian language users currently face a broken internet experience, where 70 per cent face challenges with text input and keyboards in English. Gopal is our attempt to address those challenges,” said Arvind Pani, Co-Founder and CEO. Early adopters of Gopal are most likely to be BFSI, telcos and e-commerce firms, he said.
Customised for India
Citing the example of e-commerce platforms which use the cart icon prominently, Pani pointed out that over 80 per cent of Indians have never seen a shopping cart in their lives. The existing UIs (user interface) have been designed keeping mature English language users in mind, which does not make them inclusive.
In a survey conducted by Reverie, featuring 472 Indian language internet users over the age of 45 on Android devices across 15 towns, it was found that 54 per cent of the respondents found mobile recharge through Gopal’s voice suite easier to use than the existing options; 35 per cent showed willingness to use a similar voice-based service to recharge their phones on a regular basis.
Reverie’s offerings include Language-as-a-Service cloud platform providing Indic typing, content conversion, multilingual search & discovery, consumer mobile apps for Indic language users, etc. Reverie’s solutions have touched the lives of over 124 million Indians and its device footprint has crossed the 350-million mark.
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