Exotel launches exclusive lab to spur innovations in voice space

BENGALURU: Exotel, one of India’s leading cloud telephony companies, has launched 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 analyze 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 premiere 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.”

“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,” commented the new Research Software Development Engineer, Balaraman Lakshmanan.

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.