Chennai researcher Vinayagam part of 20 young innovators, named Social Innovator
for creating Mobile Antakshari
MIT Technology Review India announces India TR35 list of young Technology Innovators
under 35 for 2012
Chennai, March 23, 2012:
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.
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.
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.
Vinayagam 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.
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For media queries on TR35 list and for agenda and media pass to attend Emerging
Technologies Conference, EmTech India 2012 at Bangalore on March 27 and 28 please
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