As we all are aware of the COVID-19 pandemic situation in India and the followed nation-wide lockdown, our country has undergone some significant improvements, the biggest one being- digitisation.
Not that digitisation newly began during the lockdown period, it had already begun when Reliance Jio was announced offering free 4G internet and then at minimum costs, literally destroying the competition in the telecom industry of India. COVID-19 gave this transformation, a tremendous boost and start-ups got an unprecedented wave of new clients from all across the country, especially rural Indians who were just introduced to the world of internet.
This became an issue for start-ups because a majority of this demographic prefers to communicate in their regional language and this sudden surge from several parts of the county created a need to inculcate vernacular solutions for the start-ups to cater to the communicable needs of people coming from smaller and rural regions of the country.
Arvind Pani, CEO of Reverie Language Technologies, a language technology start-up says that lots of businesses and organisations are now adopting digital technology to communicate with people who speak and understand their respective regional language. There is no way that these agencies and organisations should only operate in English.
India is a diverse nation and catering to this diversity is the first and foremost job of start-ups, organisations, agencies and even established companies, said an analyst about adopting vernacular solutions.
Reverie Language Technology developed an Indian language voice solution for the banking sector. Anuvadak is one of their brilliant vernacular solution that boosts the processing speed of developing, processing, launching and then optimising a webpage or a website in multiple desired languages. This application was approved by the government of India and was used during the peak months of COVID-19 to translate and post the MyGov COVID-19 guidelines page in 10 different languages for citizen’s proper understanding.
Similar measures were taken by banks, such as Axis Bank, who has created and inculcated a multi-lingual voice assistant bot named AXAA. This bot is created to handle a hefty amount of customer queries in a day and can be tweaked to support more than 10 regional languages of India with over 170 different dialects.
AXAA is developed by Vernacular.ai, a Bengaluru-based start-up who has used Vernacular Intelligent Virtual Assistant (VIVA) as a platform to develop the multi-lingual bot for Axis Bank and has deployed the same in all Axis Bank contact points.
These are just a few examples, Vernacular solutions are being taken into account and companies like Vernacular.ai and other language technology start-ups are coming with more new and improved ways to efficiently remove this language barrier between online services and citizens of India.
