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Sing and play Mobile Antakshari

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CIOL Bureau
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CHENNAI, INDIA: A young Chennai innovator, Venkatesan Oosur Vinayagam, has been chosen to the MIT Technology Review’s India TR35 list of young Technology Innovators under 35 for 2012 for developing Mobile antakshari. 

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Voice-based mobile technology solutions hold key to the future of health care, governance and entertainment information services in India. Venkatesan Oosur Vinayagam, founder of Chennai-based Hexolabs Interactive Technologies, demonstrated this in the entertainment space by creating Mobile Antakshari, a game usually played by small to large groups of people.

Mobile Antakshari is a multilingual speech recognition technology enabled mobile music service that is based on the classic Indian musical game of antakshari, where the player or team sing songs that start with last consonant letter of the song sung by the previous player or team. When a team sings a correct song they earn points. The innovation in Mobile Antakshari is in adding right usability and technology elements.

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Mobile Antakshari uses complex algorithms to match users input with over 10,000 songs and evaluates whether it is the right song. The complexity increases manifold when one has to create a database of songs in four major Indian languages – Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. Each of the four languages has in excess of 1,500 songs and required a grammar code that needed to be written to give the system points of comparison with what players were singing. Though Mobile Antakshari employs complex algorithm in the back end, it has created a simple and accessible voice interface.

Mobile Antakshari can be played either against the artificial intelligence or against friends. In the former, a player is presented with four modes of play. All four modes expect players to recognize a song and sing it back, although the clues in each differ.

Vinayagam is now working on a mobile semantic search product to help non-data consumers discover Web contents over simple voice call. This allows user to search by using a voice input and results would be delivered over the voice output or SMS.

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Venkatesan will present his innovation to an audience of 500 innovators including six outstanding scientists and researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at the fourth emerging technologies conference of MIT Technology Review’s, EmTech India, starting March 27 at Bangalore.

Bangalore’s Anirudh Sharma, 24, of Ducere Technologies was named the Innovator of the Year for creating Haptic shoe for the visually impaired. Animesh Nandi, 33, of Bell Labs India, Alcatel-Lucent for devising personalized privacy frameworks. Nandi was the only India TR35 member from a Bangalore based multi-national while the rest were from local enterprises.

The India TR35 members from Bangalore include Shirish Goyal, 27, of LinkSmart Technologies for creating fool-proof security to prevent data theft; Sumeet Yamdagni, 29, of Instrumentation Scientific Technologies for inventing Optical instruments for Fiber Bragg Grating sensors and Vikas Malpani, 28, of MaxHeap Technologies for bringing communities on a common floor.

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