Wednesday

About Ubona

Ubona is a Bangalore based startup with a simple mission - "Comprehend what people say".

Ubona’s charter is to create a new medium that will be able to understand what people say and trigger appropriate actions to service what has been said. Ubona’s vision is to make the contact simple and help build the association between consumers and businesses in the real world.

Ubona has launched a service for foodies in Bangalore where the user can speak the name of the restaurant and get connected directly to the restaurant.
Ubona is constantly working towards launching other such exciting services in domains like Entertainment,Automotive, Shopping, Health & Beauty etc

Team Ubona


Team @ Ubona believe in delivering value to the consumer with cutting edge technology. Challenges are never show stoppers at Ubona. Irrespective of the role, everyone here is conversant with wide range of topics ranging from Fast Fourier Transforms, Spectral Subtraction, Multi-band Noise Gating, Hidden Markov Model, Viterbi search to consumer adoption, usability to advertisement ecosystem. Working on our own architecture, algorithms, core Java, telephony and call control are some of the things very routinely we do here. Team Ubona is a vibrant lot with the unique strength of experience and youthfulness.

The leadership team at Ubona consists of individuals who are proven motivators with a rich history of creating value, intellectual property and patents.

40 comments:

Rahul Jagtap said...

Some questions for the team:

1. Do you'll use Hidden Markov Toolkit for training the models or you guyz have written programs for that?

2. What features do you guyz extract from voice? LPC or MFCC. I think Mel Frequency cepstral co-efficients give a better accuracy?

3. Do you'll use a dialogic card also?

- Rahul Jagtap

Umesh said...

Rahul

Thanks for visiting our blog. My answers to your questions below:

1. The statistical models in our system are indeed based on Hidden Markov Models. The algos for training the markov models are more or less standardized, available off the shelf and therefore don't require re-invention. The real difference comes from the mechanism (system arch and not just the HMM topology/param) in which they are applied.

2. Your guess is correct :-)

3. No. Our objective is to build a mass-market service while keeping the cost of our infrastructure as low as possible!


-Umesh

Rahul Jagtap said...

Thanks for your reply!
Was curious to ask these questions as I had worked a very long time back(7 years) on HMM and speech recognition. Infact even a lil bit on Continuous speech recognition(i.e not isolated words)

Wish your team All the very best.

Umesh said...

Rahul

Thanks for the wishes. Do keep in touch, we will be launching some more interesting services in near short term :-)

cheers
umesh

TSR said...

Hi Team,

I would like to present you a speech service idea, can I meet any of you in person.

Thanks

Anonymous said...

Team Ubona, step forward & take a bow!!!!
Too good business concept. All the very best

Vishal said...

Hi TSR,
Would be glad to meet you in person. Please send me a mail @ vishal@ubona.com

Thanks
Vishal

Vishal said...

Many Thanks Madhur for your appreciation. Consumer Delight is what we are aspiring for.
We are launching our next service around movies pretty soon. Do keep in touch.

Thanks
Vishal

Anonymous said...

Team Ubona,

This is such a cool concept. I hope you guys succeed. I would love to live in a future where this service is omnipresent. Go for it guys!!!

And yes, like Madhur said, "Take a bow!!!" :-)

Good luck!

Regards,
Rahul Rao

Vishal said...

Thanks a lot Rahul for your encouraging words. We are diligently working towards making this service omnipresent.

cheers,
Vishal

Androcton said...

Awesome service!!! Keep it up Team Ubona!!

Anonymous said...

I love the service. It seems to have a very high tolerance for different accents. Works all the time. Keep up the great work!!!

Vishal said...

Thanks a lot Satish. I'm glad that you liked the service and hope you'll use it everytime you order food or dine out :)

Regards,
vishal

Vikram said...

how do you make money on this ?

Anonymous said...

Vikram

Sorry for the delay in replying.We have deployed the current service for the validation of the technology and we are in porcess of extending this for all other domains. Our vision is to create a convenience stop for the consumers with numberless telephony. We would like to monetize this with contextual advertsement, lead generation and key word selling.We will put these once we establish the consumer proposition effectively. After launching the service we have got a lot of feedback on the requiremts and currently we are also looking at model called "voice to service getway" which will be available for enterprises and businesses for applications like search, ticketing, content downlaod, location based services etc. We will look at transaction based pricing here.

I hope this should give you some idea about our revenue model.

Regards
Vishal

Anonymous said...

Hi Guys,
Congratulations on a job well done and all the best for the future I beleive you will do very well. Just one questiom... I read somewhere that Ubona is swahili for 'I hear'? I come from Kenya and speak fluent swahili I hear in Swahili is Nasikia. Where did you get Ubona from?

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the encouragement.

The name Ubona was suggessted by our well wisher and we have accepted it as most of us have liked it.

As you come from that part of the world, you must be knowing this much more than we than do.

We have seen that in Zhulu it means "I see"

Now whatever it means as we have this name, we need to work on to provide a service to the consumer, so that he does not have any doubt that Ubona is "hearing" him correctly each and every time.

annie said...

It seems to be a great concept,i'm sure it will be fun to use it when it offers a wider range of services.waiting for the services to be offered in delhi n around.
good luck
animesh.

Anonymous said...

Thanks Animesh

we are working on to extend the services to call all locations of bangalore.

Really looking at the investors to help us to extend it to all other Indian cities.

Vishal

Anonymous said...

Look at 800 Genie which was unveiled at Demo conference - one of the most pretigious conferences in the world. It does almost everything youc an image and is voice based - checking email, posting blog, traffic, maps, 411 and their speech rec engine is rocker. Clearly the future.

Anonymous said...

Brilliant....

Kudos Ubona

Unknown said...

what is the kind of investment you are looking at to launch in other cities?

-Murthy

Anonymous said...

Dear Prakash

many thanks for your encouragement.We are really happy that you have found it useful.

Dear Murthy

You can reach Deepak our head of sales and marketing at deepak@ubona.com

Thanks
Umesh

Anonymous said...

Hi,

It is a great idia and a great concept and congrats on getting Capital18 back-up. I am excited to see your brand get recognised. I have small question. The phone number will be a toll-free number or cost will be passed on to the constomer? If it is passed on to the customer, you need to be 100% sure on the technology you have.
Thanks.
Dattatreya

Anonymous said...

i wish you all the best for your product, and yes i will be using your services! its a cool one.

Well i cant stop thinking that if your product clicks; it might be copied from the mobile service providers ( who can advrt it extensively ); because such service already exists from service providers for various other needs (ex: choosing ring tone etc ).

So may be the will buy your product or have their own....

Any ways good luck; its a good product....

Anonymous said...

Ganesh

Thanks for your encouragement. We are really happy to know that you find our service useful.We are in the process of talking to the service providers/operators. We have raised the funding mainly to address this scaling asnd sales need.

Dattatreya

Thanks for your best wishes. We also feel that with Capital18 we will find a great partner.

The current focus of our compnay is to deliver services for businesses and enterprises. In near future also we will relook at our consumer service. We completely agree with your point and working on the models to see if we can support a toll free number.

Anonymous said...

It certainly breaks new grounds in the field of Information Technology and has contributed to the Comfort Levels of mankind!!!

I would definitely be looking out for the other boxes to be checked very soon...on the link below!!!

http://www.ubona.com/htmls/services.html

Wishing Team Ubona All the Best!!!

Joy deep Majumder said...

Bangalore is delighted :) Good job guys....

I guess you guys are still missing out on a segment of population entirely..about 2% of it...assuming the population of bangalore is 6 crores ..further assuming that 70% maxed out would have the inclination and need to use this service ...
The 9 lacs (approx as in 2008) which consitutes the 2% of the target bangalore population wd be left out...

Believe me ..that 2% of population has a tremendous potential...at leat i believe so..

Vishal said...

Thanks a lot Abhinandan. We'll have all the boxes checked pretty soon :).Keep the good wishes flowing in..

cheers,
Vishal

Unknown said...

Hi Vishal,

This is Sumit From Delhi. Might forgot...
Anyways Many Many congrates for this success.
Tell me when this service is going to come in Delhi?

Sumit.

kumar66 said...

Greetings !

I believe you'll have the potential to be a google on the phone. Imagine if people who are not computer familiar can run the same searches using their phone and you'll produce the results from the net. This breaks new ground and you'll take the net out of the computer ! For e.g. someone says blore to mumbai 12 oct and you give them the best prices available after searching the net. It is obviously a huge step ahead from your current model of giving info from stored data but the potential is immense.

Cheers

Vishal said...

Hi Kumar,
We are deploying services in various domains which will be beneficial to people who currently do not have access to the internet. It's our dream to take relevant services to millions of people in India who can't read/write and have voice as the only medium of communication. We'll be launching these services pretty soon so keep watching this space :)

cheers,
Vishal

MyBlog said...

Hey guys,

Great service. Tried it. Its very good. Keep up the good work. Awaiting the launch in Delhi as well.
Shubhra

Anonymous said...

EXCELLENT concenpt,
All the best to UBONA,
Any plans to launch it international?, that would be great.

Vishal said...

Thanks Shubhra.. We have other cities on our cards. You'll hear from us pretty soon on our launch in Delhi..

Thanks Shakil - Currently we are concentrating on the Indian market though International markets are definitely on our roadmap.

-vishal

Unknown said...

Hey Guys, great to see you all in the photo on your website.

Best of luck, you guys rock!!!

will definately try it out when i am in bangalore next time and meet up with you all

--Yogi

Unknown said...

Hey Guys, great to see you all in the photo on your website.

Best of luck, you guys rock!!!

will definately try it out when i am in bangalore next time and meet up with you all

--Yogi

Vishal said...

Hey Yogi.. Thanks a lot.. It's great to hear from you. Let us know whenever you are in blr..

cheers,
Vishal

Anonymous said...

I've been following up the indian startups for some time now. This is the best idea I've come across so far!

Kudos to Ubona team and all the best...

BTW, why you didn't nominate yourself for NEN hottest startup contest?

--Prashanth

Anonymous said...

Great to see a Team work in action and kudos to all the Initiators and Leadership team.

Vishal, so Glad to see you with your core leadership team.

My Best wishes for your growth, success and to reach the heights of your vision.

God Bless.
--
Best Regards
Niren Patel
** When you shoot for stars,Moon comes along the way.