Bengaluru AI start-up develops speech-to-text technology supporting 9 Indian languages

Apart from English, Liv.ai supports Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam.

The start-up says the speech recognition technology can be used by people on many apps like WhatsApp and Facebook; it converts their mother tongue into text as they speak.

Liv.ai earlier stated the platform was showing promising growth, especially in English, Hindi, Marathi, and Kannada languages.

Explaining what triggered the idea behind Liv.ai, Subodh Kumar said they wanted to automate routine activities and "free up the human minds" so that their productivity in complex tasks could be improved.

He added the "inability to communicate with the machines in our own language" also motivated them.

They want to "make machines more humane" so that communicating with them is natural and stress-free.

Kumar said that many Indians are not proficient in English, but most speech recognition technologies are based on this language.

The founders realized that global speech-to-text solution might not work in India and thus they envisioned an India-specific solution.

Liv.ai primarily focuses on Indian languages, supporting various accents with high accuracy.

It works well even with telephonic conversations and also in noisy backgrounds.

The start-up collected a lot of data from many parts of India and improves the technology continuously with the help of user feedback to take of the different dialects/accents.

Subodh said initially, "the road has been rough," but now their hard work is bringing rewards.

Liv.ai gets over a million hits in a day; they want to increase it to a billion by 2018-end.