We feel elated most of the time, seeing technological advancements. Every time we come across news around AI and related technologies such as NLP, we see the enormous scope they offer and potential breakthroughs. However, it is critical to understand that we shall be well prepared to utilize these advancements to the fullest. 

However, the capabilities of the technology do not match with the adoption rates. The reasons could be many and shall not be ignored. 

Talking specifically of NLP as a voice-based technology, we can say that it holds tremendous potential. We need people to get comfortable with it and use it conveniently in their everyday lives. For this, the applications of the technology shall be simple and straightforward too.

India has approximately 500 million smartphone owners and to empower these people who are not native English speakers requires an AI speech engine tool that could ease their interactions with the voice applications.

These speech engines use NLP at the core to process various languages in applications such as customer support, onboarding, lead qualification, and user engagement processes. 

Many young entrepreneurs are working extensively in this area and developing products that would specifically cater to India's linguistic diversity.

Vernacular.ai cofounded by Sourabh Gupta and Akshay Deshraj, works on innovating the speech recognition market with AI even in remote areas. According to them, "Voice will truly be the future of human interface with machines."

They are working on making the chatbots more sensitive to the understanding of the user's current mood, state, and emotions during an ongoing call. Moreover, the intent is to make the bot distinguish between full stops, commas, pauses, intentional stops, and all. They are also using state of the art neural networks trained on thousands of hours of acoustic data for speech to text conversions. 

 This level of sensitivity is of utmost importance in India with many languages and many styles of speaking. This helps understand the user better, leading to improved user satisfaction.

Gnani.ai is a Bengaluru based startup founded in 2016 working on the issue that we just talked about. The company is engaged in the development of a range of products built on voice-recognition technology in six Indian languages, which include: Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, and Indian accented English. The founders Ananth Nagaraj and Ganesh Gopalan believe hybrid is the future. They are working to make it possible for us all to have a conversation with any IoT device in any Indian language. The startup's unique APIs can be leveraged from speech-text analysis, advanced speech analytics, and AI-backed predictive models in regional language.

Some major applications of NLP in India are:

• To achieve the Digital India that we have envisioned, we need to use deeper research and more user friendly NLP applications in India. These applications must be working seamlessly with Indian regional languages and with accuracy. 
•  Increasing smartphone usage requires more convenient ways of engagement. However, the language barrier is a concern, and with Indian linguistic diversity, it becomes even more important to have vernacular NLP come to the front. 
• India has been culturally rich and diverse, and all of that is also well documented and preserved. This has always attracted global attention, and hence we must utilize NLP to convert and preserve these manuscripts digitally. This shall be made available to and for people without any language barrier so that it's available to everyone.
•  NLP can be extensively applied to help differently-abled people with usage in the interpretation of sign languages, conversion of text to speech or speech to text, etc.
• India has most of its signboard either in regional languages or English. However, we need to devote a mechanism where the user can translate the text written on a signboard to his desired language. This will make travel more accessible. 

India being the cultural and religious heritage has so much to offer to the world. These are times of global collaborations for knowledge. NLP has come as a great support to make it possible for the world. The current pandemic definitely taught us to be preserving and valuing what we have and there is no other way to achieve it other than with technology. 

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