“India Offers Immense Potential For Innovative Voice-based Mobile Applications”

But why aren’t Indian laboratories churning out any, asks HTK in his occasional Guest Blog Mobile Musings.
HTK: I thought I would bring up one of my favourite mobile topics, voice. In this multilingual country (India), it is startling to see how much we have ignored voice as a killer app for so long. We all know how well OnMobile is doing and the hard work they had put in over the last few years is of course one of the greatest things to have happened. But I am afraid we are still not seeing enough happening. We need more OnMobiles and go well beyond that. We have not seen the rise of any cutting edge, path-breaking voice application in recent times.
I suspect that data has proven to be far easier to implement and a lot of us have gone along that path. But we need to look ahead. Skype has proven to us that voice is a concept whose frontiers are defined by the human mind. We are still very much scratching the surface out here and from all evidence, not doing terribly well at it. For instance, voice based interactivity is not happening. Secondly, a lot of news organizations that service the heartland, are not finding a place in the mobile scheme of things. The moment you bring out voice, you need to address the aspirations of the larger masses, the bypassed people.
I remember Spice doing a feed of Gurbani (a Sikh religious prayer) from the Golden Temple many years ago – that was a simple but a startingly relevant idea. I recently saw the fusion of Intel with Dolby on a PC and the impact that quality voice can have on a digital experience is pretty astonishing. We need to see how that can be translated into numbers- and numbers in India mean and will mean mobile phones. Voice has the ease of adaptability, if we look ahead at the opening up of rural markets. There is an explosion waiting to happen – we need to go and light the fuse. As I have always maintained, a lot of people need to get together and do a lot of talking- operators, aggregators, developers and content owners need to work together as much as possible to grow the industry.
I believe one of the fundamental problems we are facing – and which is not possibly the case elsewhere – is the disconnect between industry and academia. Some of our brightest brains and imaginative minds are in college campuses – very little is happening in terms of helping them create new knowledge and imagination based enterprises. Instead, digital smokestacks are being created with mind-numbing regularity. This needs to change. The mundane is essential – but the riches created from plodding must fund the chariots of fire.
Read HTK’s Previous Columns:
About Pricing, Triple Play And Tremors: Guest Blog By HTK

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