Using cloud telephony for distributing content-The Kan Khajura Story

To be frank, when Hindustan Unilever approached us for Kan Khajura Tesan, we were a little doubtful of the idea. After all, who would give a missed call and listen to bollywood content.

Now after 2 years and 34 million subscribers later, we have been proven wrong. By far, this has been one of the most successful campaigns ever carried out by HUL.

The numbers are mind boggling. As has been reported, 35 million subscribers, 45 million ad impressions in last 15 months, 900 million minutes consumed. It has won every award that has to be won in marketing including the Golden Lion at Cannes. If this was a web site, this would have been one of the top web sites in India with regular visitors and MAUs.

So hats of to the HUL team for pulling this off. And we are thankful that you let us be a part of this wonderful journey and proud that Ozonetel powers this huge platform.

In a way, I think this can be the future. At a time when the voice usage minutes are going down, KKT has shown that we can use the same networks to disseminate content too. And the quality is telco standard. I think with the future advancements in telco technology, the days of HD Audio is not far ahead and I can only dream of what new content can be delivered to all the connected people.

Most handsets are optimized for voice calling and give better battery life than connecting to data and playing songs.

To be frank, there is still a long way to go. Costs have to be consolidated. Quality has to improve. But I think KKT has shown a brief glimpse of what it takes to deliver content using phone networks.

Cloud Telephony-History and state of the art

Well, its been 11 years since Twilio launched their voice API in November 2008. I would say that was a major turning point in the cloud telephony industry. Before that, for people to build telephony applications, you either had to depend on proprietary platforms like Avaya dialog designer or build on arcane technologies like VXML which again was supported at varying degrees by the incumbents. Enter Twilio with their voice API and the industry changed for the better. Since it's been almost 11 years now I thought now might be a good time to do a comprehensive review of the cloud telephony industry as a whole in general and in India in particular. The Beginning Twilio was undoubtedly the startup which ushered in the era of cloud telephony. They started in November 2008. At that time in India, we at Ozonetel had launched a hosted VXML platform. There were no takers. After all who coded in VXML :) So when Twilio launched and we saw them take off, we immediately realized tha...

Google business messages and chat agents-A match made in heaven

Google has launched Google business messages without much fanfare. It's just a small button that pops up when someone searches for your business on Google. But from the conversation industry perspective this is HUGE . Do you know that the small call button drives millions of calls i n a year for pizza joints and other retailers in the US. Businesses spend more than a trillion dollars supporting billions of customer service calls each year. Now imagine how many chat conversations the "Message" button can drive. Think of how customers interact with business. 1. Search on Google. 2. Click on web site link. 3. Web site shows chat pop up and tries to force the user to chat.(Annoying. I know :)) 4. User clicks on chat and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. This flow can now be completely changed. The new flow can be: 1. Search on Google. 2. User clicks on Message and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. What if you could design a customer experience that helps...

Telugu ASR speech data collection

Image Source: IIIT-H Developing an indigenous ASR for Indian languages has been a goal for us since a long time. In that regard we have been experimenting a lot, trying out various neural network architectures. While doing these experiments we found that there was no good dataset for Indian languages. While discussing with IIIT professors we got to know that the government of India was also exploring options to generate a good dataset. We immediately offered our help and our platform for this endeavor. So, as a starting step we have come up with a few campaigns to encourage users to donate speech data. We wanted to make it fun, so our first few campaigns are along the lines of JAMs(Just a Minute speech topics) etc. A topic will be provided and you need to speak for a minute on that topic. We have started this campaign for college students to start with. Of course anyone can participate and contribute their data. The more the merrier :) We will adding a lot more innovative ways ut...

Cloud Telephony Experiments

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