Exotel, one of India’s leading cloud telephony companies, announced the launch of Exotel Labs with a vision to spur innovation in the voice space. Exotel Labs will have a team of researchers specializing in machine learning, data mining and signal processing. The team will algorithmically analyse calls to provide data on calls and connectivity. They have roped in the Founder of Crispify, Balaraman Lakshmanan, as a Research Software Development Engineer.
Balaraman Lakshmanan’s role includes solving major problems in the domains of voice and speech analysis, data mining and machine learning. In the next six months, Exotel Labs will look at aggressive hiring in the field of research and add 10 more people to the team. Labs also plans to collaborate with universities to encourage research in the above mentioned areas. Talks are on with some of the premier institutes in the country.
On the occasion, Siddharth Ramesh, Co-Founder and CTO, Exotel said
Voice communication is at the core of most businesses in India. We, as a country, love to talk. Exotel Labs is our research division which will focus on an innovative approach to solving problems in the voice space. Balaraman, our first hire, brings with him a lot of years of experience from his stint at Crispify and Aricent. We’re excited to see how Bala’s efforts can improve customer experience for the companies we work with.
Balaraman Lakshmanan, Research Software Development Engineer, Exotel said
The voice space in India has a massive potential for development and Exotel is the first to tap into this potential. It’s an intriguing problem that Exotel is looking to solve and I am excited to be a part of this. Being the first member of Exotel Labs, I hope to use my strong fundamentals in DSP as well as my entrepreneurial experience at Crispify to eventually crack the voice communication problems.
Balaraman started Crispify after discovering that he wanted to automate the video editing process. Crispify is an android app which removes low motion frames from the given video to make the output video crisper.
Western countries are far ahead of India in terms of intelligence in voice communication. Even basic speech technologies are still in the nascent stages here. Multiple languages and accents make India an interesting market for a researcher.
About Exotel
Exotel is the most reliable and scalable cloud telephony platform in India. Founded by Shivakumar Ganesan, Ishwar Sridharan and Siddharth Ramesh in 2011, it powers voice communication for over a 1000 businesses including brands like Ola, Uber, Flipkart etc. Voice & Data picked Exotel as the Editor’s Choice Emerging Company of the Year 2014. Nasscom’s Emerge Product conclave picked Exotel as one of the top 10 emerging startups in India. For more information, please refer Exotel